Every time I walk by the statue of Christopher Columbus a few blocks south of my Philadelphia office, I get flashbacks about the hot, June days at the beginning of the pandemic in 2020, days after George Floyd died from police brutality, a fentanyl overdose, or both.
You’ll remember tensions were very high all over the country. The Black Lives Matter movement triggered a lot of anger against the presumed establishment.
Things were particularly heated in my hometown, more particularly in my neighborhood. South Philly has traditionally been an enclave for first-, second-, third- and even fourth-generation Italians whose immigrant heritage stretches back to the southern part of the boot. I am not a South Philly native, but I’ve worked and sometimes lived in the area for over 30 years, so you could say I blend.
You know who doesn’t blend? Millennials and Gen Z social justice activists who learned how to spell indigenous the same time they discovered a multiplicity of pronoun options.
As a result of Floyd’s death, there was a lot of reckoning in cities around the country. Philadelphia was no exception to that rule.
In particular, our then-Irish American Mayor Jim Kenney, who was himself a native of South Philadelphia, decided Christopher Columbus was a genocidal maniac and needed to be erased from our collective consciousness.
One Saturday evening in June 2020, he dispatched his municipal henchman to tear down a statue that at that point had presided over Marconi Plaza for decades.
The statue itself was over 150 years old, and had never been the target of anything, except perhaps itinerant pigeons. But in that hot summer of 2020, Columbus, and by extension Italians who respected him, became the enemy.
Kenney miscalculated. He didn’t understand that you simply do not mess with South Philadelphia, home of the fictional Rocky.
A bunch of what a friend called the “Marconi Veterans” got together and protected the statue from being removed. It was an amazing display of ethnic pride.
Tattooed men in wife beaters, grandmothers in housedresses, little kids tagging along behind mothers with 87 layers of mascara, immigrant Italians in Juventus jerseys, young girls who you know went Catholic Goretti and who had not been infected with “woke,” and me.
We surrounded the statue, and it is true that some of us yelled epithets in English and Italian, including those of us who were fluent in both, but we were overall quite peaceful.
The statue stayed put. And then, our petulant and mean-spirited mayor retaliated by boarding the statue up in a wooden sarcophagus for over a year.
Unlike other cities governed by officials with linguine spines, Philadelphia pushed back. But so did our mayor. Since he could not get his way about the statue, Kenney turned his attention to our holiday, the one celebrated every October. He took it off the city’s municipal calendar and replaced it with Indigenous Peoples’ Day.
It was a clear and pointed attack against the Italian community in Philadelphia. He could have simply picked another day to give to the Indigenous. He did not do that. He deliberately replaced Columbus with the Indigenous. The symbolism was obvious.
Kenney decided to erase Columbus the way he and his fellow travelers believed that Columbus had erased the Indigenous.
The Marconi Veterans, and many others who felt that the city was engaging in a defamatory campaign against an entire group of people, hired an amazing attorney named George Bocchetto.
Through exceptional legal skill and Italian moxie, Bochetto was not only successful in keeping the Columbus statue in its original location. This past week, he obtained a unanimous victory from an appellate court, who held that erasing the Columbus Day holiday was illegal.
It is difficult to put into words what this means, but I will try.
While the judges were likely following the sterile guidelines of administrative municipal law, for those of us who dealt with the attacks on our character and our heritage for over five years, it was the sweetest of victories.
We keep our statue. We keep our heritage. We get our name back. And our holiday, which was inaugurated in memory of innocent Italian immigrants who had been lynched in New Orleans over a century ago, simply for being foreigners, was restored to us.
The moral of this story is, don’t mess with Italians.
Or to put it another way: Take the cannoli if you want, but leave the holiday.
Christine Flowers is an attorney and a columnist for the Delaware County Daily Times in Pennsylvania.
