Vandals have covered a Rhode Island statue of the 15th century explorer Christopher Columbus in red paint for Columbus Day.
Residents of Providence awoke on Monday morning to find a statue of the explorer covered in red paint with a sign that read, “Stop celebrating genocide.” The word “genocide” was painted on the back of the statue in orange paint.
The vandalism marked Columbus Day, a federal holiday commemorating the explorer’s arrival in the Americas in 1492. Columbus Day has grown contentious in recent decades after activists began pushing to change the day to Indigenous Peoples Day.
The Indigenous Peoples Day movement sprung up around the 1992 quincentenary celebration of Columbus’s first voyage to the New World when scholarship of the Italian explorer was growing. The movement gained traction around the idea that Columbus sparked centuries of mass killings against Native Americans.
Columbus’ voyage to the New World, at that time unknown to Europe, marked the beginning of centuries of mass immigration from Europe to the Americas. The explorer completed four voyages from Europe to the New World and earned the title “Admiral of the Ocean Sea” before his death in 1506.
