Christopher Columbus statue beheaded in Boston
A good statue of Christopher Columbus in Boston provides been beheaded, law enforcement said Wednesday, as calls to eliminate sculptures commemorating colonizers and slavers sweep America on the trunk of anti-racism protests.
A good Columbus statue was as well vandalized in downtown Miami, and another was dragged right into a lake earlier in the week in Richmond, Virginia, according to regional reports.
The incidents come as pressure builds in the usa to rid the united states of monuments associated with racism following substantial demonstrations over the killing of George Floyd by a white officer in Minneapolis previous month.
Italian explorer Columbus, extended hailed by school textbooks as the so-called discoverer of "The New World," is considered by various to have spurred years of genocide against indigenous groups in the Americas.
He is regularly denounced in a similar way to Civil War generals of the pro-slavery South.
The Boston statue - which stands on a plinth in the heart of town - has been controversial for years, like other Columbus statues over the US, and has been vandalized previously.
Boston law enforcement were alerted to the destruction soon after midnight on Tuesday, a spokesman told AFP. An investigation is under way but no person has got been arrested, he added.
A jogger running at night statue Wednesday said she approved of the decapitation.
"Appearing out of the Dark Lives Subject protests, I believe it's a good thing to capitalize upon this momentum," she told AFP, without providing her name.
"Just like black persons in this country, indigenous people are also wronged. I believe this movement is very powerful and this is very symbolic," she added.
A large number of American cities experience over the years replaced "Columbus Day" found in October - which became a good federal holiday in 1937 - with a evening of tribute to indigenous peoples.
But not Boston or NY, that have large Italian-origin communities.
Boston's mayor Marty Walsh condemned the beheading but added that the statue would be removed on Wednesday pending a good decision about its future, neighborhood media reported.
Protesters also defaced a good Miami statue of Columbus in a waterfront park with crimson paint and messages that browse "Our streets," "Black Lives Subject" and "George Floyd," before law enforcement made several arrests, based on the Miami Herald newspaper.
In Virginia, protesters used ropes to draw down the eight-foot (2.44-meter) statue and then dumped it in a good local lake Tuesday, the Richmond Times-Dispatch said.
It echoed an incident in Bristol, England, in Sunday when demonstrators toppled a statue of a slave trader and dumped it in a harbor during anti-racism protests.--AFP
