They have ‘blood on their hands’
- Columbus statues vandalized from Boston to Miami
- Statue of scout founder Baden-Powell to be taken down in Britain
- Trump nixes idea of renaming US bases honoring Confederate heroes
- Australian PM calls for racism protesters to be charged
Statues of Christopher Columbus from Boston to Miami have been beheaded and vandalized as calls to remove sculptures commemorating colonizers and slavers sweep America on the back of anti-racism protests sparked by the death of George Floyd.
Italian explorer Columbus, long hailed by school textbooks as the so-called discoverer of "The New World," is considered by many to have spurred years of genocide against indigenous groups.
A statue of the navigator standing on a prominent plinth in central Boston was beheaded overnight, police said Wednesday.
Almost 2,400 kilometers away in Florida, another memorial at a waterfront park in downtown Miami was defaced, with red paint sprayed on its hands alongside messages that read "Our streets," "Black Lives Matter" and "George Floyd".
"That man literally has blood on his hands. Us putting the fist on his chest and the blood on his hands is symbolic," one protester told the Miami Herald.
And in Minnesota -- where Floyd died in police custody on May 25 -- protesters on Wednesday tied ropes around the neck of a Columbus statue outside the state Capitol and hauled it down to cheers and applause, images from CBS affiliate WCCO showed.
Earlier in the week in Virginia, demonstrators used ropes to pull down the eight-foot (2.44-meter) statue and then dumped it in a nearby lake, the Richmond Times-Dispatch said.
The wave of attacks comes as pressure builds in the United States to rid the country of monuments associated with racism following massive demonstrations over the killing of Floyd by a white police officer in Minneapolis last month.
Statues of Columbus -- regularly denounced in a similar way to Civil War generals of the pro-slavery south -- have been controversial for years in parts of the US, and many have been vandalized in the past.
A jogger running past the fallen Boston statue Wednesday said she approved of the decapitation.
"Just like black people in this country, indigenous people have also been wronged. I think this movement is pretty powerful and this is very symbolic," she said.
Dozens of American cities have over the years replaced "Columbus Day" in October -- which became a federal holiday in 1937 -- with a day of tribute to indigenous peoples.
The attacks on Columbus and Confederate memorials follow a similar incident in Bristol, England, on Sunday when demonstrators toppled a statue of a 17th Century slave trader Edward Colston and dumped it in a harbor during anti-racism protests.
Yesterday, a local authority in southern England said it would remove a statue of Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the worldwide scouting movement.
Baden-Powell is widely hailed for setting up the scout movement which boasts 54 million members worldwide. In a poll in 2007, he was voted the 13th most influential person in the United Kingdom in the 20th century. But critics say he held racist views and was a supporter of Adolf Hitler and fascism.
Meanwhile, US President Donald Trump said Wednesday that US military bases honoring Civil War Confederate leaders will not be renamed, pushing back on pressure to rid public places of monuments glorifying the once pro-slavery South.
Ten bases honoring generals from the secessionist South, which lost the Civil War and its struggle to preserve slavery, are in the spotlight.
Comments