Baltimore, August 22 (RHC)-- In Baltimore, in the U.S. state of Maryland, activists took a sledgehammer to a 44-foot-tall monument to Christopher Columbus, destroying part of the statue and then attaching a sign to its base reading: "The future is racial and economic justice." 

One of the organizers of the protest told reporters: “Christopher Columbus symbolizes the initial initial invasion of European capitalism into the western hemisphere.  Columbus initiated a centuries-old wave of terrorism, murder, genocide, rape, slavery, ecological degradation and capitalist exploitation of labor in the Americas.  That Columbian wave of destruction continues on the backs of Indigenous, African-American and brown people."