Mayor Lori Lightfoot said Friday she has no plans to duplicate at the city level what her handpicked school board just did, infuriating some Italian Americans. That is, replace Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples Day.
“I do think we’ve got to do a lot more to do to make sure that we are aware and sensitive of the history but I absolutely have no plans to support any elimination of Columbus Day at the city level,” the mayor said at an unrelated news conference after unveiling her plan to bolster CTA security.
Lightfoot noted that for a number of years, the Chicago Public Schools have essentially celebrated both Columbus Day and Indigenous Peoples Day. She “thought that made sense.”
The mayor was not asked — nor did she explain — why, if she thought a shared holiday made sense, her handpicked school board forged ahead with the change that has so infuriated Italian American aldermen and civic groups.
She would say only that she has “spent time with folks from the American Indian Center” and that there is “a lot more we can do to elevate the history of indigenous people —in the past, but also in the present.”
“They are a marginalized community and . . . there’s a lot more we can do,” she said.
Ald. Anthony Napolitano (41st) applauded Lightfoot for “drawing a line in the sand” by retaining the city holiday of Columbus Day. But he urged the mayor to go further and persuade the Board of Education to reverse its decision to drop Columbus Day.
“I’d like to see it at the school level, too because, with the direction we’re going should we start throwing out history books? History books are filled with this same exact thing all around the world,” Napolitano said.
As for the school board’s split decision this week to change the holiday, Napolitano said, “If they went on without her, I don’t think that’s possible. I like that she’s trying to get ahead of it at the city level. I’d just like to see it at the schools as well. I’ve got three kids in the public schools. We’re getting calls all day. People are like, `Why are we re-writing history?’ “
Ald. Nick Sposato (38th), the City Council’s other Italian-American alderman, said he knows for a fact that the Board of Education “went ahead without her.” Be he would be “grateful and thankful” if Lightfoot could convince the board to reverse it. He argued that “liberal” CPS should not be allowed to “rewrite history.”
The decision to drop Columbus Day came in a split vote by the seven-member Board of Education, with two members voting against changing the CPS calendar. The October holiday had previously been recognized as “Indigenous Peoples Day/Columbus Day.”
Board member Elizabeth Todd-Breland, an associate professor of history at the University of Illinois at Chicago, argued then that it was the board’s “responsibility to lead on this issue.”
“I believe in the transformative potential of culturally responsive education,” she said. “In addition to our Indigenous students in CPS, more than 80% of our students are the descendants of survivors of European settler colonialism. I think this is important for all of our school communities and I think it’s the right thing to do now.”
The decision so outraged Sposato, he said he was “ready to go to war” with CPS.
“Go ahead and have your damn Indigenous Peoples Day. Just don’t have it on Columbus Day,” Sposato said Thursday.
“They’re taking Columbus Day away. I’m an Italian American. He found America. They want to say he didn’t. They want to say he did bad things. You know how many people were on the three ships when he came here? Ninety. You think he could do the things they’re claiming that he did with 90 people?”
Sposato likened the effort to the movement sweeping the nation to tear down statues of U.S. presidents and other historical figures who were slave owners.
“It’s time for war with CPS about changing this, changing history, changing the day,” he said. “We’re gonna fight ‘em to change it back to what it was.”
The Joint Civic Committee of Italian Americans, is mounting a campaign to reverse the action on behalf of the 500,000 Italian Americans in the Chicago area.
Its president Sergio Giangrade said Columbus is “a symbol for the resilience of a people that have helped shape the cultural landscape” of America. While the “historical legacy of any individual is and should be subject to debate,” Giangrande said that debate “should not give license to the wholesale removal of a symbol . . . that was a beacon of hope for millions of maligned Italians who helped create the beauty of this country.”
