A statue of Christopher Columbus was erected on the White House grounds outside the Eisenhower Executive Office Building on Sunday, a move that flies in the face of Black Lives Matter (BLM) leftists who tore down the original one in 2020.
The replica statue was crafted with pieces of the monument the protesters toppled in Baltimore, Maryland, and threw into the city’s harbor, the New York Post reported Sunday.
It was commissioned by the Conference of Presidents of Major Italian American Organizations (COPOMIAO), the outlet said.
“Unveiled in 1984 by President Ronald Reagan, destroyed in 2020 during civil unrest and revived by COPOMIAO and President Donald Trump, the Baltimore Columbus statue now stands on the White House grounds in celebration of Italian American history and culture,” the organization said, noting it was also in celebration of America’s upcoming 250th anniversary.
The organization also said Baltimore officials refused to install the updated statue in public; therefore, its leaders contacted President Trump.
COPOMIAO President Basil M. Russo said:
Columbus statues have long stood as symbols of pride and cultural identity for more than 18 million Americans of Italian descent. For over a century, Columbus’s legacy helped Italian immigrants navigate prejudice and hardship, serving as a source of unity and belonging as they built new lives in this country. Columbus Day itself emerged in the aftermath of the 1891 New Orleans lynching, when 11 Italian immigrants were killed by a mob of thousands, an event that prompted a national effort to promote the acceptance and assimilation of Italian Americans. This history remains central to why these monuments matter.
Video footage from 2020 showed a leftist wearing all black preparing to pull down the original statue, which stood in Little Italy.
When the statue was brought down, the crowd of leftists cheered and jumped up and down when it hit the pavement and shattered to pieces. It was dumped into the harbor and crews later retrieved the pieces, according to WJZ.
A woman who spoke to the outlet at the time said the protesters were “forcing their agenda” and did not want to engage in “meaningful discourse.”
The BLM activists claimed Columbus was responsible for the genocide and exploitation of native Americans, according to the Post.
In a 2020 article for Breitbart News, author Robert Royal said there was a “violent attitude” among protesters regarding Columbus:
The historical record, which is extensive and easy to consult, would go far towards tamping down the anti-Columbus hysteria – for anyone really interested in knowing the truth. That, however, doesn’t seem to be a large cohort these days. Instead, many of our fellow citizens have since early school days been indoctrinated into the belief that Columbus was a “genocidal maniac” and (what else) “worse than Hitler.”
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Columbus and the Europeans did not bring slavery, racism, inequality, exploitation, imperialism, or torture to the New World. They all already existed here. The peoples of the New World were human beings, like the people in the Old World, with the very same all-too-human traits we associate with human nature.
What Europeans did bring was Christianity, the only religion that took seriously the notion that all human beings have been made in the image and likeness of God – however much Christians in the New World may have failed to live up to that truth.
President Trump said in April he was “bringing Columbus Day back from the ashes” after “the Democrats did everything possible to destroy” the explorer, and months later he signed proclamations to observe Leif Erickson Day and Columbus Day, according to Breitbart News.
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