A city panel recommended Friday that Chicago permanently remove its three Christopher Columbus statues and the Balbo Monument in Burnham Park, and consider altering or removing nearly 40 other monuments. It is not clear if the city will follow the recommendations of the report by the Chicago monuments project advisory committee. In May, Mayor Lori Lightfoot hinted strongly at ignoring them. Lightfoot formed that…
“It is senseless to try and make them into a political agenda,” he wrote.
In July 2020, Lightfoot ordered two Columbus statues “temporarily” removed in the middle of the night from Grant and Arrigo parks, based on information that something bad was about to happen. A third Columbus statue remains standing near 92nd Street and South Chicago Avenue. The report urges the city not to return the Columbus statues in Grant and Arrigo parks because “the image of Columbus has become a bitter reminder of centuries of exploitation, conquest and genocide.”
The statues would also see continued “adverse public reaction,” and providing long-term security for them is untenable, the report states. near Soldier Field because it “was a gift of the fascist government of Italy” and named after “a leader of the movement’s paramilitary Blackshirts” and “a supporter of Italy’s forced annexation of Ethiopia.”
DuSable Bridge reliefs that show “the Battle of Fort Dearborn within an allegorical narrative of the triumph of Western civilization. American Indians are used as merely a foil to help define the heroic acts and qualities of colonizing forces.”
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