Columbus Day in Chicago has been about Christopher Columbus the same way that St. Patrick`s Day is about a saint. The parade is an occasion of ethnic pride: a time for Italian Americans to wave flags and for politicians to shake hands.
But not this year, the 500th anniversary of the famous-infamous voyage of the explorer-exploiter.
Red dye, symbolizing blood, was dumped into the Chicago River, a variation on the more whimsical St. Patrick`s Day tradition. Red paint was tossed on the Michigan Avenue bridge sculpture depicting a battle with Indians and frontier soldiers.
Protesters objected to the celebration of Columbus as a hero, making him out not just as a wayward sailor who gets too much credit for bumping into an island near a continent, but a symbol of all the ways whites have destroyed cultures different than their own.
All in all, parade day in Chicago was part circus and part debate. And, as was the case in other cities across the Americas this year, it was wholly different than anything that had come before.
The Joint Civic Committee of Italian Americans, which sponsored Chicago`s parade, had bowed to public protests by inviting the American Indian Center to march as the first entry in the parade, just behind the phalanx of politicians and Italian-American community leaders that traditionally leads off the parade.
The politicians were jeered by some, but the small group of protesters fell silent when the Native Americans marched by.
The shouts resumed when floats with costumed ”Christopher Columbuses”
and the Italian American War Veterans followed.
Mayor Richard Daley, who was in the parade`s front ranks, was clearly miffed by the demonstrators and the acts of vandalism that had occurred earlier in the day.
”You cannot blame Christopher Columbus for all of the ills in this country. No one`s perfect in life. Everybody`s trying to blame him for everything,” Daley said.
”I am very proud to march in the Columbus Day parade with the Italian-American community. It`s ridiculous to blame Christopher Columbus for everything.”
Tom Pearce, a member of the American Indian Movement, which organized a protest in Denver on Saturday that led to the cancellation of the Columbus parade there, saw no reason to honor Columbus for anything.
”His picture should be in the history books right next to Adolf Hitler`s,” Pearce told a crowd of 300 earlier in the day at the Michigan Avenue bridge.
Red paint had been thrown on the bridge`s stone frieze, ”The Defense,”
dedicated in 1928 in remembrance of a battle between soldiers and Indians at Ft. Dearborn in 1812.
According to he inscription, the Indians ”brutally masacred” those within the fort.
Red paint also was splashed on a statue of Abraham Lincoln on Columbus Drive during the night, and anti-Columbus demonstrators dumped red dye in the Chicago River in a morning demonstration to symbolize what the protesters said was the blood of Native Americans.
Demonstrators pouring the dye in the river, unfurled a banner with the message, ”Sink the Myth of Columbus,” as they paddled along in a canoe.
Pearce and the protesters staged their own sidewalk parade on Michigan Avenue beginning at the bridge, and later about 100 gathered at the Federal Building plaza to stage a silent vigil.
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That vigil grew noisy when the parade passed, but mounted police moved in to keep the demonstrators from further disruptions.
During the day of demonstrations, a total of nine protesters were arrested on charges ranging from defacing public property to disorderly conduct, according to police.
Two people were carted away as they changed the street signs of Washington Street and Michigan Avenue to Geronimo Pratt Street and Lolita Lebron Avenue. Pratt was a former Black Panther minister of defense convicted of murder in 1968. Lebron was a Puerto Rican woman sent to prison in 1954 in connection with the shooting of five members of Congress.
At one point, just 10 minutes into the parade, three demonstrators ran out into the street and lay down in a symbolic ”death,” but Chicago police quickly carried them into a waiting squadrol. The parade marchers didn`t even have to break cadence.
Columbus Day activities started, unofficially, with a 7 a.m. demonstration by 25 Amnesty International members participating in a National Day of Action highlighting human rights abuses against indigenous peoples. The demonstration was held at the Lincoln statue at Columbus and Jackson Drives.
But a spokeswoman for Amnesty International said the group has not taken a position on Columbus Day or on whether or not it should be a holiday.
Though Monday`s anti-Columbus outbursts were louder than similar events in recent years, as parade protests go, they were relatively mild. During the Vietnam War, the annual Armed Forces Day parades saw more violent protests.
And when, in 1980, then-Mayor Jane Byrne invited U.S. Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.), then a presidential candidate, to march in the St. Patrick`s Day parade, disgruntled city workers and Democratic Party members virtually booed him off the route.
This year, Columbus Day events throughout the nation have become the target of protests as never before. While the parade in Denver was canceled, other cities downplayed the annual event in deference to Native American groups and sympathizers.
But it is the history books where things must change, said Bill Hernandez, who teaches 4th grade at McCormick Elementary School.
”I think it`s very wrong for the country to affirm what Columbus did,”
said Hernandez, who was part of the protest at the bridge. ”There were 20 million people here when he came to this part of the planet. And that`s what I teach my kids. I tell them that Columbus didn`t really discover America. And Columbus is not a hero.”
Some parade watchers, who numbered in the tens of thousands, could not understand why anyone would protest.
”I haven`t read that much on it, but I didn`t realize people were against Columbus Day,” said Mary Thompson, who was downtown with her two small sons for a doctor`s appointment.
Along the parade route, Paige Cunningham watched the event with her three small children. She said she is afraid only the ”politically correct”
version of Columbus` voyage will make it into the school textbooks in the future.
”He really believed that God gave him the vision to explore and find a new route to China,” Cunningham said. ”He was sorry for some of the tragedy that came out of his exploration. He was a great man, but he had faults just like the rest of us.”
Betty Resnikoff, a University of Chicago English professor who attended the protest at the Michigan Avenue bridge, questioned not only Columbus`
credentials as cultural icon but the traditional view of his ”discovery.”
”I don`t think the parade should mention discovery because that has become ridiculous,” she said. ”It`s a question of invading someone else`s country and calling it discovery. That`s like going into someone`s garage and telling them that you discovered their car, and so it`s yours.”