Videos show a large group of demonstrators pulling down the Christopher Columbus statue near the Little Italy neighborhood in Baltimore on Saturday night.
Vandals used ropes to knock the monument from its pedestal, which eventually came crashing down to the loud cheers and applause from the gathered crowd. Police were a no-show at the spectacle.
Jubilant protesters took the uprooted statue to Baltimore's Inner Harbor and threw it into the water, as police made no apparent attempt to intervene.
Lester Davis, a spokesman for Democratic Mayor Bernard C. "Jack" Young, said the incident would not affect the city authorities' decision to fully embrace the protest. Saying that the city wants to "serve as a national model" on how to handle the unrest, she noted that the local authorities are going "to continue to support it."
"That's a full stop," she said.
Addressing the lack of any response by the police, Davis said that the officers "are principally concerned with the preservation of life," and since statues are inanimate objects, they are not a priority.
The Columbus statue in Baltimore was unveiled back in 1984 by Mayor William Donald Schaefer and President Ronald Reagan. It is just one of many historical monuments that have been either damaged or outright toppled during the ongoing wave of protests against police brutality that kicked off following the death of unarmed black man, George Floyd, at the hands of police in late May.The protest movement has since taken on a wider range of societal issues, turning into an attempt to reckon with the nation's legacy of slavery.[Preserving life] is sacrosanct. Everything else falls secondary to that, including statues
I also thought about the Italian connection and quickly looking it up, it seems he was born in Genoa which was not a part of Italy at the time, he moved to Portugal in his 20s and then settled in Spain. It shouldn't offend modern-day Italians, really.
We may have to become "barbarians" at some point. We're not all sheep.