08/27/2026
It’s hard to believe that we are here. Again. But as they say, those who refuse to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
On May 25, 2020, Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin knelt on George Floyd’s neck for more than nine minutes, while Mr. Floyd was handcuffed, lying face down in the street, shouting “I can’t breathe!” Captured on video, Mr. Floyd’s public murder rocked our nation to its core and birthed a summer of uprisings and protests.
Rallying around the cry that “Black Lives Matter,” protesters, activists, and everyday Americans were determined to show that Mr. Floyd’s death was not in vain. After decades of horrific police killings of Black men, Dylan Roof’s terrifying 2015 massacre of Black worshipers at a church in Charleston, S.C., the 2017 deadly Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally, and the 2022 mass shooting of Black people in a supermarket in Buffalo, N.Y., the United States was overdue for a “come to Jesus” moment with our nation’s racial violence and the underlying ideologies of white supremacy that justify it.
No city was immune to this reckoning. Not even our city. That summer, four Black high school students from Central High School organized a march to the Columbus statue in Seaside Park to call for its immediate removal. These young women did not ask anyone’s permission. They did what they saw was just, moral and necessary. The Golden Hill Paugusset tribe and the NAACP joined in. We did too, alongside Bridgeport Strong, the Interdenominational Ministerial Alliance, and many more. Councilman Jorge Cruz and state Rep. Antonio Felipe, both of whom represent the South End, joined protests to end racial violence along with Councilman Ernie Newton and state Rep. Chris Rosario.
The efforts by four high school students opened our collective eyes and with clarity, we could all see that the Christopher Columbus statue has no public place in Bridgeport. While even then we recognized this was painful for some, it was time to tell the truth and refuse to look away.
In response to intense public pressure and acts of vandalism, Mayor Joe Ganim ordered the statue to be removed from Seaside Park and placed in storage. The administration knew then what they still know now: The majority of residents do not want the statue in the park.
About 70% of Bridgeport residents identify as Black, Puerto Rican, and Latino. The majority of our families have immigration stories from Central and South American countries such as Brazil, Guatemala, El Salvador, Ecuador, Mexico, and from Caribbean countries including Haiti, Dominican Republic, and Jamaica. African Americans whose ancestry can be traced to formerly enslaved Africans in the South, saw mass migration north to Bridgeport during the Jim Crow era. What unites these migration stories is that they all have direct ancestry that suffered under the violent European colonization of the Americas, the enslavement and genocide of Indigenous people, and the trans-Atlantic slave trade that enriched the European continent for hundreds of years.
The myth of Columbus is a uniquely American one. His “discovery” story provided early 19th century American leaders with the hero they needed to believe slavery and the killing of Native Americans was justified. In this American tall tale, Columbus represents the moral and intellectual superiority of white Europeans. And by the 1930s, Italian Americans, who themselves were being discriminated against, wanted in and to be a part of the club.
The people who are proposing the Columbus statue be returned — Christopher Caruso of Bridgeport, Mayor Mark Lauretti of Shelton, and Dan Onofrio of Shelton — must acknowledge this truth. And they have a moral obligation to not only recognize the racial and ethnic reality of Bridgeport, but also to respect it.
Respect looks like honoring the decision to remove the statue from our most prominent park. Respect looks like finding someone else from Italian history whose legacy tells a story of justice, peace, and healing, not racial violence and colonization. Respect looks like placing the Columbus statue in Shelton — where Mayor Lauretti is clearly in support of, or in a private establishment such as the Circolo Sportivo Italian American Club.
There is no common ground to be found by forcing the return of the Christopher Columbus statue to Seaside Park because its presence there serves no common good.
But if a small group of people are determined to repeat history, we will be prepared to stand up and fight once more.
- by Gemeem Davis and Calabria Gale Heilmann, the co-directors of Bridgeport Generation Now.
Advocates seeking statue's return to Bridgeport's Seaside Park should acknowledge that 'Columbus represents the moral and intellectual superiority of white Europeans.'
