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A video posted today on YouTube shows a thug vandalizing the inscription at the base of the 44-foot-tall Christopher Columbus monument located at the intersection of Harford Road and Walther Avenue, across from Herring Run Park. This monument is the oldest to Columbus in North America and one of three in Baltimore.
The person narrating the video said,
“Christopher Columbus symbolizes the initial invasion of European capitalism into the Western Hemisphere. Columbus initiated a centuries-old wave of terrorism, murder, genocide, rape, slavery, ecological degradation and capitalist exploitation of labor in the Americas. That Columbian wave of destruction continues on the backs of Indigenous, African-American and brown people.
“Racist monuments to slave owners and murderers have always bothered me. Baltimore’s poverty is concentrated in African-American households, and these statues are just an extra slap in the face. They were built in the 20th century in response to a movement for African Americans’ human dignity. What kind of a culture goes to such lengths to build such hate-filled monuments? What kind of a culture clings to those monuments in 2017?”