A statue of Christopher Columbus was beheaded in Boston Tuesday night. It comes as statues of Confederate leaders and people tied to slave trading around the globe are being vandalized and torn down amid protests against racial inequality and police brutality. The Boston statue has previously been the subject of vandalism, having been beheaded once before in 2006 and painted with the words “Black Lives Matter” in 2015. There has been a country-wide effort in recent years to change the October holiday celebrating Columbus to Indigenous People’s Day, given Columbus’ ties to brutality against Native Americans and the beginnings of the slave trade.
