Protesters in Baltimore on Saturday toppled a statue of Christopher Columbus and tossed it into the city's Inner Harbor, the Baltimore Sun reports.
Why it matters: It's the latest monument toppled by demonstrators during the protests against racism and police brutality. Statues of Confederate soldiers and slave owners have been a flashpoint in the protests.
- Protesters have removed statues of Columbus in several places around the country. The Italian explorer, "who had long been credited by history textbooks as a hero who discovered America, has come under fire over his violent enslavement of native people," the Sun writes.
What they're saying: Tearing down the statue was part of a “re-examination taking place nationally and globally around some of these monuments and statues that may represent different things to different people,” said Lester Davis, a spokesperson for Mayor Bernard Young (D), on Saturday.
Video of the event posted on Twitter showed protesters cheering as the statue was thrown into the harbor.
Baltimore’s Columbus statue gets dumped in the harbor pic.twitter.com/ZwuNcqAH6d
— J. M. Giordano photo (@jmgpix) July 5, 2020
