This is a Reform Petition to Properly Remove and Re Address the Christopher Columbus Statue at Columbus Park in Trenton NJ. It should be placed into a Museum it is still an art work. Please Read further on history. The park is now in a diversified community and it serves the community no purpose standing.

Columbus wasn't the first to discover the New World. Indigenous people had been living there for centuries by the time he arrived in 1492 and Leif Eriksson and the Vikings beat him to it five centuries earlier. Christopher Columbus explored and discovered new lands but he did not discover America. Columbus upon reaching land found and named it Hispaniola , During his exploration he encountered Indigenous people of the Indigenous Caribbeans. The Taíno were an Arawak people who were the indigenous people of the Caribbean and Florida. At the time of European contact in the late 15th century, they were the principal inhabitants of most of Cuba, Jamaica, Hispaniola (the Dominican Republic and Haiti), and Puerto Rico. History is written that those Arawak and Taino people were under one Arawak king. They lived in peace. Peace was not always the normal but mostly peaceful. When Columbus first set foot on Hispaniola, he encountered a population of native people called the Taino. A friendly group, they willingly traded jewelry, animals, and supplies with the sailors. “They were very well built, with very handsome bodies and very good faces,” Columbus wrote in his diary. “They do not carry arms or know them....They should be good servants.” The natives were soon forced into slavery, and punished with the loss of a limb or death if they did not collect enough gold (a portion of which Columbus was allowed to keep for himself). He used the kindness of the Taino to his advantage.

Christopher Columbus enslaved the Native Taino Indians and when he ran out he went to Africa and enslaved the Africans. He helped start the Trans Atlantic Slave Trade trading slaves for various exploits throughout Europe. He enslaved girls and boys as young as 9 years old. The treatment was so horrible that pregnant mothers would give birth and kill the new born so that they wouldn't have to be in the hands of the Spaniards. When Spaniards and Taino woman had babies the Spaniards would throw them to the hungry dogs for food. He forced the Taino to convert to Christianity if they didn't do so they could end up enslaved , raped or killed. When he had an uprising he released a pack of hungry dogs onto the Taino people the dogs tore them apart limb by limb. In 1 day he brutally killed 3000 Native Taino it was witnessed by Bartolomé de las Casas, scenes of diabolical cruelty, which he later chronicled with exacting detail. He described how the armored Spaniards would pacify a village by initiating massacres; how they would enslave their captives and punish any who rebelled by cutting off their hands; how they would consign them to die before their time through overwork in the mines and plantations. His reports, based, as he frequently noted, on “what I have seen,” included accounts of soldiers suddenly drawing their swords “to rip open the bellies” of men, women, children and old folk, “all of whom were seated, off guard and frightened,” so that “within two credos, not a man of all of them there remained alive.”

Columbus’s governance of Hispaniola could be brutal and tyrannical. Native islanders who didn’t collect enough gold could have their hands cut off, and rebel Spanish colonists were executed at the gallows. In 1499, the Spanish monarchs got wind of the mistreatment of Spanish colonists in Hispaniola, including the flogging and executions without trial. Colonists complained to the monarchy about mismanagement. A royal commissioner dispatched to Hispaniola arrested Columbus in August 1500 and brought him back to Spain in chains. Although Columbus was stripped of his governorship, King Ferdinand not only granted the explorer his freedom but subsidized a fourth voyage. Although some of the charges may have been manufactured by his political enemies, Columbus admitted to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella that many of the accusations were true. Columbus was stripped of his title as governor. Columbus and his brother were thrown in jail for his crimes. He died in 1506 at the age of 54.  

Christopher Columbus, the legendary Genoese explorer and navigator, ​has been retold and rewritten many times. To some, he was an intrepid explorer, following his instincts to a New World. To others, he was a monster, a slave trader who unleashed the horrors of the conquest on unsuspecting natives.