Columbus Day in the United States

Columbus Day in the United States marks not a discovery, but the federal sanctification of a European invasion into lands already home to millions of Indigenous people and connected to African knowledge and labor. The holiday’s official story—of a lone Italian navigator heroically “finding” a New World—was crafted centuries later to unify white ethnic blocs and to cleanse the memory of enslavement, conquest, and resistance from the national calendar.

1.Origins and the invention of a “discovery”

When Columbus sailed west in 1492, he encountered Caribbean islands already populated by Taíno and other Indigenous nations with complex political, agricultural, and spiritual systems, not an empty wilderness awaiting Europe. His own journals record these peoples, their hospitality, and his immediate interest in their enslavement and conversion.

The idea that he “discovered America” was not contemporaneous; it was popularized in the nineteenth century as the United States and newly consolidated Latin American states searched for founding heroes that predated their own revolutions. In the U.S. context, white elites and ethnic leaders promoted Columbus as a neutral, Catholic-but-assimilable figure who could serve as a symbol for white immigrants while sidestepping the more divisive legacies of slavery and Native dispossession.

2.The holiday’s creation and white ethnic politics

Columbus Day as a modern U.S. celebration began with local Italian American and Catholic processions in the nineteenth century, especially after the 1891 lynching of eleven Italians in New Orleans, one of the largest mass lynchings in U.S. history. Civic leaders, seeking to repair relations with Italy and fold Italian immigrants into the category of “white,” embraced Columbus as a shared hero, turning his image into a tool for whitening populations once viewed as alien.

President Benjamin Harrison’s 1892 proclamation of a one-time national celebration of the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s voyage, timed with the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, was less about historical accuracy than about showcasing American “progress” and white supremacy in architecture, exhibits, and racial hierarchy. In 1937, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, under pressure from Italian American organizations like the Knights of Columbus, made Columbus Day a federal holiday, cementing the myth in schoolbooks and calendars.

3.Erased violence: Indigenous genocide and the Atlantic slave system

Behind the sanitized parades lies a record of forced labor, sexual violence, and mass death. Within decades of Columbus’s arrival, Indigenous populations in the Caribbean were ravaged by European violence, disease, and enslavement schemes like the encomienda, which conscripted Indigenous labor for mines and plantations. Columbus and his men shipped captives to Spain as slaves and demanded tribute in gold or cotton, practices that prefigured the vast Atlantic slave system that would later traffic millions of Africans.

The holiday’s heroic narrative also sidesteps Black presence in the early Atlantic. African mariners, pilots, and enslaved laborers were part of Iberian exploration and conquest in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, even if the official record rarely names them. As plantation regimes spread from the Caribbean to the Americas, the wealth that financed European courts and later U.S. prosperity rested on enslaved African labor—yet Columbus Day fixates on a single Genoese navigator and the flag he flew, not the Black and Indigenous people whose suffering and skill underwrote the system his voyage helped unleash.

4.Black and Indigenous resistance and the move toward Indigenous Peoples’ Day

From the late nineteenth century, Indigenous activists, Black intellectuals, and allied reformers challenged the glorification of conquest in public rituals. Native leaders protested the World’s Columbian Exposition’s erasure of living Indigenous nations. In the twentieth century, writers and organizers in Black newspapers, anti-imperialist groups, and the civil rights movement drew parallels between Columbus, colonialism, and contemporary racial oppression, arguing that the myth kept Americans from seeing the roots of segregation and overseas empire.

By the 1970s, the American Indian Movement and Indigenous communities were organizing counter-commemorations, including the National Day of Mourning in New England, directly targeting the Columbus narrative. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, cities, states, and institutions—often pushed by coalitions of Native, Black, and Latinx activists—began to replace or pair Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples’ Day. This shift reflects not the erasure of Italian Americans, but a refusal to anchor national belonging in a story that glorifies invasion and denies the agency of those who endured and resisted it.

5.Reframing the calendar and the story

The dominant telling of Columbus Day presents a story of bold exploration and inevitable progress, with Indigenous and African peoples appearing, if at all, as obstacles or anonymous victims. A truthful record instead centers them as nations and workers whose worlds were upended by policies of conquest and racial hierarchy designed in European courts and colonial assemblies.

The archive holds Columbus Day as a cautionary example of how public holidays can train collective memory toward pride without accountability. Reframing or replacing the holiday is not an attempt to erase history; it is an assertion that the calendar must reflect the full authorship of the Americas, including the Indigenous nations who survived and the African-descended peoples whose labor and resistance shaped the hemisphere that followed.

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7.References