Christopher Columbus Statues Vandalized In California, Rhode Island On Columbus Day

Statues of Italian explorer Christopher Columbus were vandalized in the US states of California and Rhode Island on Sunday, when the United States celebrates Columbus Day, a public holiday, in an apparent attempt to denounce the colonial nature of the American continent's discovery by the Europeans

MOSCOW (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 14th October, 2019) Statues of Italian explorer Christopher Columbus were vandalized in the US states of California and Rhode Island on Sunday, when the United States celebrates Columbus Day, a public holiday, in an apparent attempt to denounce the colonial nature of the American continent's discovery by the Europeans.

The statue of Columbus in the Coit Tower area of San Francisco, California was found covered in red paint from head to toe with a graffiti on its basement reading "Destroy all monuments of genocide and kill all colonizers."

The Italian explorer's statue in Providence, Rhode Island has also been vandalized in a similar manner - red paint and a placard next to the pedestal reading "Stop Celebrating Genocide.

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Both statues have been now washed clean, but it is not for the first time that they got vandalized.

Christopher Columbus landed on the shore of the Bahamas on October 12, 1492. Since 1971, Columbus Day has been observed in the United States as a bank holiday annually on the second Monday of October.

Over the recent years, the nationwide celebration of a man whose arrival on the American continent launched violent colonization policies and mass killings of Native Americans, has come to be increasingly challenged. Several US cities and even entire states now celebrate the second Monday of October not as Columbus Day but as Indigenous Peoples' Day.