The New Britain Racial Justice Coalition is planning an Indigenous People’s Day Teach-In event at the Main Street Columbus Statue.
“Join us this week for a Teach-in at the Columbus Statue,” the Coalition says. “Speakers will discuss the true history of the statue and bring awareness to other ways Black and Brown residents are marginalized in the city.”
“Last year,” the Coalition noted, it, “led the movement to remove the Columbus statue from New Britain. Unfortunately, Mayor Erin Stewart vetoed the resolution passed by the council, keeping it standing.”
The teach-in event is to occur on Monday, October 11, 2021 at 5:30pm. It is to be at Columbus Statue at 625 Main Street in McCabe Park.
In 2020, nationwide and in New Britain, protests and activism against systemic racism happened in the wake of the killing of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis, as well as the killing of numerous other people of color by police. In New Britain, there was a sustained summer of protest against racist inequality.
As activists in the city sought to make progress out of the antiracism movement, many of them organized the New Britain Racial Justice Coalition.
The protests nationwide included a focus on bringing down symbols of racism and colonialism, which renewed attention to accounts from a priest, Bartolome de las Casas, and others, telling about enslavement, murder, rape and other brutality upon native peoples under Christopher Columbus’ conquests.
The New Britain Racial Justice Coalition led a campaign to remove the statue of Columbus from its prominent place on the city’s Main Street. This began with a protest in July of 2020.
Some people defended Columbus and called for the statue to remain, but that counter-protest was marred by comments widely derided as racist.
After long consideration and debate, the City Council voted in December of 2020 to remove the statue. The 10 to 4 vote include both Democrats and Republicans voting to remove the statue.
But that bi-partisanship would not last.
With people’s attention focused on digging out from a nor’easter and only a week before Christmas, Republican Mayor Erin Stewart vetoed the resolution to remove the statue, with her veto message evoking “cancel culture” rhetoric that is widely viewed as racist and right-wing.
After Stewart’s veto, only eight of the needed ten Council members voted to override the veto, and Stewart’s decision stood.
But, while Stewart was deciding that the Columbus statute would remain in a place of honor in the city, the city Board of Education voted, in July, by a 7 to 2 vote, to permanently change the city schools’ recognition of Columbus Day to Indigenous People Day.
Thus, thousands of New Britain students in the city’s public schools have October 11th as a day off from school, not in honor of Columbus Day, but rather in recognition of Indigenous People’s Day.
