By Kanishka Singh
WASHINGTON, March 22 (Reuters) – The White House has installed on its grounds a statue of Italian explorer Christopher Columbus in the latest bid by President Donald Trump’s administration to reshape depictions of U.S. history and culture.
The campaign against an ideology Trump calls “anti-American” has encompassed the dismantling of slavery exhibits, restoration of Confederate statues and other moves that civil rights advocates say could reverse decades of social progress.
“The statue is now residing on the north side of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building on the White House campus,” Trump told the Conference of Presidents of Major Italian American Organizations in a letter on Sunday.
He thanked the group for its gift of the statue to the government.
During the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests after the killing of George Floyd, several U.S. cities took down statues of the Italian navigator, whose Spanish-funded voyages from the 1490s onward paved the way for Europe’s conquests of the Americas.
Floyd’s killing led to a worldwide re-examination of the colonial era and the legacy of slavery.
Protesters for racial equality challenged heroic portrayals of Columbus, saying they downplayed or ignored his cruelty toward indigenous people of the Americas.
Trump called Columbus “the original American hero and one of the most gallant and visionary men to ever walk the face of the Earth,” in the letter made public on Sunday.
The statue at the White House is a reconstruction of one unveiled by late President Ronald Reagan in Baltimore in 1984.
In 2020, that statue was dumped into the city’s harbor by protesters whom Trump called “anti-American rioters” in his letter.
Last week, the Interior Department said a statue of Caesar Rodney, an enslaver and signer of the Declaration of Independence, will be displayed in Washington after it was taken down amid racial justice protests in Delaware in 2020.
A statue of Confederate General Albert Pike, overturned during 2020 protests, was reinstalled last year in Washington.
(Reporting by Kanishka Singh in Washington; Editing by Clarence Fernandez)
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