The Philadelphia police patrol cars regularly patrol Marconi Plaza, a small park in the south of the American metropolis. This is less due to the problems that are otherwise common in green spaces, such as drug trafficking. Rather, it has to do with a wooden box painted in the colors of the Italian tricolor that stands there. More specifically, with the statue covering the plywood panels. It shows the discoverer Christopher Columbus in marble and larger than life and has been there for 146 years.
The monument is the subject of a debate that has not only divided Philadelphia’s citizens, but has deeply divided the entire nation for years – and is far from over: Who and what actually represents America’s history? Who should be remembered and who shouldn’t? It’s about the culture of remembrance – and also about Cancel Culturei.e. the highly controversial efforts to withdraw public attention from everything that could have a racist or discriminatory background.
In many places in the USA, Columbus Day, a public holiday in October to commemorate the discoverer, has already been officially abolished. And two years ago, across America’s cities, monuments dedicated to men who played a role in US colonial history or in the defense of the slave-holding Southern States were being draped or toppled. That was after the death of black George Floyd. In May 2020, a white police officer on the open street in Minneapolis squeezed his breath until the 46-year-old suffocated. For days there was unrest in many US cities, but above all a debate about racism in American society began.
Can this part of American history be celebrated with monuments?
The Columbus statue in Philadelphia was then hidden from view by a wooden shed, because with the arrival of the discoverer in the New World in 1492 the genocide of the indigenous population of America began and slavery began – a part of history that really isn’t should be celebrated with monuments. The “Friends of Marconi Plaza” found that the “Friends of Marconi Plaza” complained because they saw the memory of the part played by Americans of Italian descent in the country’s history as diminished by the wrapping of the monument. Columbus is from Genoa.
On Friday, the Commonwealth Court of Pennsylvania, the highest administrative court in the US east coast state, ruled that the city administration must remove the wooden box, which has meanwhile been painted green, white and red. After all, Judge Mary Hannah Leavitt wrote, the statue is a memorial and not “town property like a snow blower is.” The matter had become additionally complicated by the fact that Philadelphia’s Columbus monument had itself been placed under monument protection in 2017. Which is why the statue, as a cultural asset worthy of protection, could not simply be taken off the pedestal and taken to the depot, as has long been the case in other metropolises of millions, such as Chicago, Boston or Minneapolis.
A small demo last week in Stamford, a town near New York, shows how much Columbus or the memory of America’s – white – history of discovery still divides the country. There, a dozen residents protested the planned abolition of Columbus Day in the city’s schools. However, their central demand is likely to be undisputed by many of the city’s citizens: “There must be no school on Columbus Day.”