The Columbus That Named Itself After Columbus

The city was named Columbus in eighteen twelve, honoring Christopher Columbus, the Genoese navigator whose fourteen ninety-two voyage opened the Americas to European colonization and, depending on how you read the next five hundred years, to everything that followed.

For most of those two centuries the name was not a controversy. It was simply the city's name, the way any city's name is simply its name. Then came nineteen ninety-two, the five-hundredth anniversary of the voyage.

Columbus, Ohio, hosted AmeriFlora ninety-two, a global horticulture exhibition at Franklin Park that drew five and a half million visitors and cost roughly one hundred million dollars to produce. The city threw itself a birthday party for a man it was named after. Indigenous groups across the Americas organized to oppose it. They argued that the quincentenary was a celebration of genocide, dispossession, and the destruction of peoples who had been in these places for thousands of years before Columbus arrived. The boycotts and protests did not stop AmeriFlora. But they were noticed.

The city of Columbus had a large bronze statue of Christopher Columbus that had stood outside City Hall since October twelfth, nineteen fifty-five. In June of twenty twenty, following the killing of George Floyd and the wave of protest and monument reconsideration it triggered nationally, Columbus mayor Andrew Ginther announced the statue's removal. A construction crew took it down on July first, twenty twenty. The city announced in twenty twenty-three that it would not return.

The city is still named Columbus. This has not been resolved. What has been resolved is the statue.