A Christopher Columbus statue in Baltimore, Maryland has been toppled by a group of people, who used ropes to tear it down before tossing it into the water. The mayor’s office said it stands with the protesters.
Videos show a large group of demonstrators pulling down the Christopher Columbus statue near the Little Italy neighborhood in Baltimore on Saturday night.
Protesters just took down the Christopher Columbus statue in Baltimore’s Little Italy. pic.twitter.com/ViPk5eKOtz
Vandals used ropes to knock the monument from its pedestal, which eventually came crashing down to the loud cheers and applause from the gathered crowd. Police were a no-show at the spectacle.
RAW VIDEO: A witness shared this video of the moments right after the statue was pulled down. He said a group came during ongoing protests in the park and pulled the statue down. Warning: there is profanity in the video. @wbaltv11pic.twitter.com/GjNFArJbRV
Jubilant protesters took the uprooted statue to Baltimore’s Inner Harbor and threw it into the water, as police made no apparent attempt to intervene.
Baltimore’s Columbus statue gets dumped in the harbor pic.twitter.com/ZwuNcqAH6d
Lester Davis, a spokesman for Democratic Mayor Bernard C. “Jack” Young, said the incident would not affect the city authorities’ decision to fully embrace the protest. Saying that the city wants to “serve as a national model” on how to handle the unrest, she noted that the local authorities are going “to continue to support it.”
“That’s a full stop,” she said.
Addressing the lack of any response by the police, Davis said that the officers “are principally concerned with the preservation of life,” and since statues are inanimate objects, they are not a priority.
[Preserving life] is sacrosanct. Everything else falls secondary to that, including statues
The Columbus statue in Baltimore was unveiled back in 1984 by Mayor William Donald Schaefer and President Ronald Reagan. It is just one of many historical monuments that have been either damaged or outright toppled during the ongoing wave of protests against police brutality that kicked off following the death of unarmed black man, George Floyd, at the hands of police in late May.The protest movement has since taken on a wider range of societal issues, turning into an attempt to reckon with the nation’s legacy of slavery.
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