We think of Columbus Day as an American holiday. What is it really? Well, the origin of the holiday is much darker than how we celebrated it in past years.
It all began with the Italian lynchings in 1891. The lynching of Italians in New Orleans was the largest single mass lynching in American history. This means that it was a single event where the most lynching occurred during the event. 11 Italians were killed over the unconfirmed suspicions that an Italian killed a police officer. After they died, they were deemed innocent.
The Italian government immediately took action. As a relatively newly united country, united in 1861, they took aggressive action and pulled all diplomats from the United States. They demanded justice for those murdered. The American government responded by offering the families of those who had died $25,000 for restitution. However that didn’t fix the racial discrimination Italians faced in America during the Jim Crow law era.
America offered a supposed solution to invite Italians into the white community. They enacted Columbus Day in 1892. They recognized that Christopher Columbus was born in Italy. Therefore the plan was to include Italians as the “founders” of America bringing them out of the discriminated class of people.
Italy didn’t feel like this was enough still and began to offer citizenship to the descendants of Italians born abroad. This created jure sanguinis which is a blood line based path to citizenship. This enabled Italians to be able to return to the safety of Italy with their families if needed.
Columbus Day was first recognized as a federal holiday in the United States in 1937. In 1892, on the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s first voyage to the Americas, President Benjamin Harrison encouraged Americans to celebrate Columbus Day as a way to honor both the explorer’s contributions and the broader themes of patriotism and citizenship. Various states and localities began to adopt the holiday, and it gained further momentum over the following decades.
The Knights of Columbus, a Catholic fraternal organization, played a significant role in lobbying for the national recognition of Columbus Day. Their efforts, along with support from Italian-American communities and other organizations, eventually led to President Franklin D. Roosevelt declaring it a federal holiday in 1937.
Originally celebrated on October 12, the date of Columbus’s landing in the Americas, Columbus Day was later moved to the second Monday in October as part of the Uniform Monday Holiday Act, which took effect in 1971. This change aimed to provide workers with more three-day weekends.
In recent years, Columbus Day has become increasingly controversial due to the historical impact of European colonization on indigenous peoples. As a result, some states and cities have replaced Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples’ Day to honor the history and contributions of Native American communities.
When history isn’t acknowledged and is attempted to be erased, it is doomed to repeat. We erase one massacre and instead remember a genocide. America continues to try and cover their hate crimes with holidays.
BethAshlei 
Leave a comment