Christopher Columbus Statue Will Be Removed From Inside California’s Capitol

A statue of Christopher Columbus will be removed from its prominent position in the California Capitol rotunda, legislative leaders announced Tuesday. 

Democratic leaders Senate President pro Tem Toni Atkins, Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon and Assembly Rules Committee Chair Ken Cooley called Columbus “a deeply polarizing historical figure given the deadly impact his arrival in this hemisphere had on indigenous populations.”

They wrote in a statement that “the continued presence of this statue in California’s Capitol, where it has been since 1883, is completely out of place today,” and that “It will be removed.”

Following worldwide protests for racial justice, statues and monuments of colonizers and white supremacist historical figures have come under renewed scrutiny. Cities including Richmond, Virginia, have voted to take down Confederate monuments. 

The announcement of the rotunda statue’s removal comes a day after Sacramento-based Sutter Health took down a statue of John Sutter, a German-born Swiss colonizer of California with his own history of mistreating indigenous people.

The Capitol statue features Columbus and Queen Isabella of Spain, who financed the Italian navigator’s expedition to the Americas.

According to the California State Capitol Museum, a prominent Sacramento banker named Darius Ogden Mills gifted the statue to the state in 1883. In a letter, Mills argued “the Rotunda of our State Capitol is an appropriate place for a work of art commemorating an event that had so great an influence on the destinies of the western world.”

The museum says Native American and Latino groups pushed for the statue’s removal during a 1970s renovation of the Capitol, citing Columbus’ treatment of indigenous people and the fact that he never set foot on what is now North American soil.