Why Are Some Americans Cancelling Columbus Day?

born of protest against a conflicting historical icon. In May of twenty nineteen, Vermont became the most recent state to officially replace Columbus Day with Indigenous People's Day. Vermont joined North Carolina, Alaska, South Dakota, Oregon, Minnesota, Maine, and New Mexico, plus the District of Columbia and at least a hundred and thirty cities across the United States that have replaced Columbus Day over the tainted legacy of the fifteenth century explorer.

Columbus was once revered as the brave navigator from Genoa, Italy, who defied credit to seek out a Western passage to India. Sure, he miscalculated the distance from Spain to India by nearly eight thousand nautical miles that's around fourteen thousand kilometers, but he stumbled onto two continents largely unknown to the Europeans in the process, and no Columbus never actually stepped foot in North America, but many European Americans still saw him

as the nation's de facto discoverer. But then a new image of Columbus began to emerge. From his journals. We learned that when Columbus first met the indigenous Hyeno people of the Caribbean Islands and noted that they were peaceful and didn't have advanced weapons technology, his first thought was to enslave them. Columbus wrote, they would make good servants. With fifty men, they can all be subjugated and made

to do what is required of them. Indeed, on Columbus's second voyage to the America's he rounded up one thousand, five hundred native Arowak men, women and children and held them in pens while his ships prepared to sail back to Spain. He chose five hundred to be taken to

Europe and sold into slavery. Two hundred of them died on the journey, and those who remained in their homeland through a combination of forced labor in Spanish colonies and European diseases like smallpox, the native populations of the Bahamas and Hispaniola were virtually wiped out within decades of Columbus's arrival. By low estimates, there were one hundred thousand Arawak on

Hispaniola in fourteen. By fifteen fourteen, only thirty two thousand remained, and by fifteen forty two there were only two hundred. Some historians claimed that up to three million Tyano died in that same time period. We spoke with Carrie Gibson, historian and author of Empires Crossroads, a History of the Caribbean from Columbus to the present day. She said Columbus didn't come over in the spirit of scientific inquiry and

cultural sensitivity of First, he was mistaken in his navigation. Second, he was looking for gold and for people to enslave. When you realize that, it's very hard to still hold him up as a positive symbol, it makes a lot of sense that some people are pushing back against Columbus day The movement to replace Columbus Day with Indigenous People's Day started back in nineteen seventy seven at a United

Nations International Conference on Discrimination against Indigenous Populations. Instead of celebrating Columbus's arrival as the foundation of the America's, participants proposed an alternative holiday that would recognize that Native people's had inhabited these lands for millennia. South Dakota ditched Columbus Day for Native Americans Day in ninete in Berkeley, California, became the first place to switch to Indigenous People's Day.

In Since then, more cities and states have distanced themselves from Columbus and embraced a new holiday that, in the words of Maine's proclamation, celebrates quote the historic, cultural, and contemporary significance of the indigenous peoples of the lands that

later became known as the Americas. The anti Columbus Day movement has its detractors, though some believe it's a case of political correctness run wild, while others alleged that repealing Columbus Day would be in a front to another ethnic group, Italian Americans. The National Italian American Foundation or n i a F wrote in a statement when Columbus Day was

founded in nineteen thirty seven. The federal holiday provided a sense of dignity and self worth in light of the hostility and discrimination that many Italian immigrants, Italian Americans, and Catholics more broadly faced. An estimated four million Italian immigrants came to America between eighteen eighty and nineteen twenty, mostly

farmers fleeing desperate poverty in their home country. Italian immigrants faced terrible discrimination and outright violence, and early Italian American civic groups latched onto the Genovesi Columbus as a symbol of pride, connecting Italians to the broader American experience. The first Columbus Day celebration was in seventeen ninety two to commemorate the three hundredth anniversary of Columbus's first voyage to America in San Francisco. Italian communities started celebrating an annual

Columbus Day as early as eighteen sixty nine. Then, in eighteen ninety one, the Italian immigrant community in New Orleans was the victim of the largest mass lynching in US history. Eleven people were killed. Following this, in President Benjamin Harrison called for a general holiday the four anniversary of Columbus landing and proclaimed Columbus a pioneer of progress and enlightenment.

At the urging of the Knights of Columbus. President Franklin D. Roosevelt made Columbus Day an official federal holiday in seven and the holiday has since become a day when many Italian Americans celebrate their heritage through community festivals and parades. Given the painful history that led to the founding of Columbus Day, groups like the n I a F are some of the staunchest opponents of state and national efforts

to erase it from the calendar. The n I a F wrote, we believe that to repeal Columbus Day as a federal holiday, which is celebrated by over twenty million Italian Americans, only to replace it by another holiday celebrated by another ethnic group would be culturally insensitive. The group says it does not oppose in Jenous People's Day as

long as held on another day beside Columbus Day. Gibson the Historian doesn't have an easy answer for solving the Columbus Day controversy, but encourages deeper reflection on the long and complicated history of the lands and people that we call American. She said, the minute Columbus arrived in Hispaniola, everything changed. We're still having discussions about how it changed, and historians are still dealing with the legacy of that

initial encounter. Today's episode was written by Dave Ruse and produced by Tyler Clang. Brain Stuff is a production of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. For more on this and lots of other controversial topics, visit our home planet, how Stuff Works dot com, and for more podcast from my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.