BOSTON: A statue of Christopher Columbus has been beheaded as calls to remove sculptures commemorating colonisers and slavers sweep America amid anti-racism protests.
A Columbus statue was also vandalised in downtown Miami, and another was dragged into a lake earlier in the week in Richmond, Virginia.
The incidents come as pressure builds in the United States to remove monuments associated with racism after massive demonstrations over the killing of George Floyd by a white police officer in Minneapolis last month.
Italian explorer Columbus is long hailed by school textbooks as the so-called discoverer of ‘The New World’ but is considered by many to have caused 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 has been controversial for years, like other Columbus statues across the US and has been vandalised in the past. Boston police were alerted to the damage shortly after midnight on Tuesday, a spokesman told a news agency, adding that investigation is under way but no one has been arrested.
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.
Boston’s mayor Marty Walsh condemned the beheading but added that the statue would be removed on Wednesday pending a decision about its future.
Protesters also defaced a Miami statue of Columbus at a waterfront park with red paint and messages. In Virginia, protesters used ropes to pull down the eight-foot statue and then dumped it in a nearby lake.
It echoed an incident in Bristol, England, on Sunday when demonstrators toppled a statue of a slave trader and dumped it in a harbor during anti-racism protests.
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