Lawmakers announced Tuesday that the statue of Christopher Columbus and Queen Isabella, a centerpiece in the California State Capitol Rotunda in Sacramento since 1883, will be removed.
Democratic Senate and Assembly leaders including current Senate President Toni G. Atkins, Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon, and Assembly Rules Committee Chair Ken Cooley, announced the decision in a joint statement.
“Christopher Columbus is a deeply polarizing historical figure given the deadly impact his arrival in this hemisphere had on indigenous populations,” the statement said.
“The continued presence of this statue in California’s Capitol, where it has been since 1883, is completely out of place today. It will be removed.”
Following nationwide protests over racial injustice prompted by the death of George Floyd, many statues are being removed across the United States, such as the statue of John Sutter from the Sutter Medical Center in Sacramento.
Sutter was a 19th century European colonizer of California who enslaved Native Americans.
The statue of Christopher Columbus and Queen Isabella was initially a gift from Darius Ogden Mills, a prominent banker who advocated for California’s Capitol to be built in Sacramento.
It depicts Christopher Columbus appealing to Queen Isabella I who funded his trip to the West in 1492 that led to the discovery of the New World and the era of colonialism in the Americas.
Since its placement at the Capitol in 1883, the statue was temporarily removed in the 1970s for Capitol restoration purposes, during which some Native Americans and Latinos campaigned for it to be removed permanently.
However, it was placed back at the Capitol and has been there ever since.
“We won’t forget that he helped spur people coming to America,” said historian Diana Greene about Columbus. “But we also can’t celebrate someone who did terrible things like that. That’s where we are now in the U.S. The Columbus statue in Sacramento being removed is following that.”
Though the decision to remove the Columbus statue has been made, it is still unclear when or how it will be removed, said Assembly Rules Committee Chair Ken Cooley, according to KCRA.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
