An Obelisk Renamed
Baltimore has a monument to Christopher Columbus, but people are trying to change that.
An Attempt at Political Solutions
Boldly protesting and rebelling against police murder, about 15 million people in the United States vigorously participated this past summer. Many more also joined in all around the world. That huge mass movement against racism pushed Baltimore City Councilperson Ryan Dorsey to propose that a monument to Columbus should be renamed as a Memorial for Victims of Police Brutality.
Dorsey candidly acknowledged that the City Council (as a relatively impotent part of the capitalist power structure) could do little more than this symbolic act, as they are powerless to grant real accountability for the stolen lives of so many victims of police brutality.
This past June, desirous of a space where the family members of victims in the Baltimore area can attain at least a fragment of healing from horrendous trauma, a large caravan was organized culminating with a rally at the obelisk, demanding re-dedication of the monument. The caravan, a West Wednesday event, was organized by the West Coalition, an organized body of activists that has been fighting tirelessly alongside the main leader, Tawanda Jones, sister of Tyrone West, who was slain by Baltimore police. Many spoke powerfully on stage, including Marah O’Neal, whose husband Jamaal Taylor’s life was stolen by police, and Dorsey who announced the bill.
The morally corrupt Mayor at the time, Jack Young, vetoed the bill, citing concerns by top cop Michael Harrison that the Obelisk was too close to another monument honouring dead cops. Clearly, a cop monument being close to a monument for a genocidal enslaver, is no problem at all.
This experience exemplifies the point made by Russian communist leader Lenin: that real power in capitalist governments is primarily in the hands of the executive branch (the outgoing Baltimore mayor, in this case) while the legislative branch (Baltimore’s City Council) is mostly for showy debate, hot air, and setting boundaries for political discussion and reforms acceptable to capitalism.
Ignoring those limitations, in the late evening of December 24th, Christmas Eve, a group of people, fed up with their city government’s inaction, could be seen between the boughs of ancient pine trees in Baltimore’s Herring Run Park. Flashlights and headlamps darted to and fro with nervous excitement, as people gathered around the large white obelisk in the corner of the park. Across the metal fence which stands around the monument were hung two giant 24-foot, hand-painted banners proclaiming: “Justice for Victims of Police Brutality”. More than a hundred stolen lives — people murdered by police in Maryland — were honoured, each of their names painstakingly embedded in one of the banners. An impromptu West Wednesday rally declared, from that moment onward, regardless of what politicians will or won’t do, that the monument is now to be known as the Memorial for Victims of Police Brutality.
History of the Columbus Obelisk
The obelisk, a 44-foot-high brick and white stucco monument, was the very first memorial in the United States to Christopher Columbus, a murderous Genoese sailor. Columbus crossed the ocean several times, and inflicted such heinous brutality on the Indigenous peoples in the Caribbean, that the Spanish monarchy (themselves no friend to oppressed peoples) had him arrested and tried for his crimes in 1500.
Then, 286 years after Columbus’ death, the French Consul to the City of Baltimore, Chevalier d’Anmour, a wealthy capitalist bureaucrat and enslaver of African people, had the obelisk built on the grounds of his mansion in northeast Baltimore.
According to writer Christopher George: “[D’Anmour] was apparently fond of entertaining on his fifty-acre estate, Villa Belmont, north of Baltimore Town. The story goes that one evening, he engaged with his guests in a conversation on [so-called] ‘Great Men of the Western World.’ Someone mentioned that 1792 would be the three hundredth anniversary of the [supposed] discovery of America, and that nowhere in the New World was there a monument to commemorate the [not at all] great discoverer, Christopher Columbus.” D’Anmour then used enslaved Africans to construct the obelisk, to be displayed at one of his next parties.
After Villa Belmont was sold and fell into disrepair, the obelisk was moved from its location, at the ostentatious D’Anmour mansion, to a small triangular-shaped patch of greenery, formed by the intersection of Parkside Drive, Walther Avenue, and Hartford Road, where it remains. For several hundred years, it was largely ignored, aside from historic registers, and eventually Ingress and Pokemon GO players.
In August of 2017, amidst the national movement for the removal of Confederate statues, a few brave souls smashed the plaque on the obelisk with a sledgehammer, in a viral video, all while posting signs reading “The future is racial and economic justice!”
The Working Class Moves
In 2020, on the evening of December 24th, Tawanda Jones was then invited to the renamed obelisk. At that time, she and many additional activists had been protesting for 388 weeks straight on Wednesdays since her brother’s murder. In front of the monument, she gave a scathing speech attacking the loyalties of the Baltimore City government to systemic racism and also attacking the broken promises by State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby to reopen her brother’s case.
About 30 hours later, bootlicking racists decided to take time out of their Christmas Day to tear the banners down and disrespect the many lives stolen by police terror. There is still no word on whether those individuals were ordered to do so by the new mayor, or if they were cops acting on their own racist initiative, or if they were supporters of an Italian American association whose leaders have vigorously and myopically argued for preserving the Columbus monument.
The obelisk itself deserves no respect as a tribute to Columbus. It was a vanity project for a rich capitalist, built using the sweat and blood of the enslaved, abandoned by its owner, and set in a park on stolen land to honour a maniacal con man.
Renaming the monument to honour those slain by the police precludes having to completely destroy the obelisk, and the bureaucrats of Baltimore City Hall would be wise to accept this solution.
