I found this article; the question it raises is one of truth and justice.

WHO WE HONOR  

Dr. Martin Luther King

Christopher Columbus

Examining the Reputation of Columbus

An Essay by Jack Weatherford - Baltimore Sun, October 6. 1989 

Christopher Columbus' reputation has not survived the scrutiny of history, and today we know that he was no more the discoverer of America than Pocahontas was the discoverer of Great Britain. Native Americans had built great civilizations with many millions of people long before Columbus wandered lost into the Caribbean.

Columbus' voyage has even less meaning for North Americans than for South Americans because Columbus never set foot on our continent, nor did he open it to European trade. Scandinavian Vikings already had settlements here in the eleventh century, and British fisherman probably fished the shores of Canada for decades before Columbus. The first European explorer to thoroughly document his visit to North America was the Italian explorer Giovanni Caboto, who sailed for England's King Henry VII and became known by his anglicized name, John Cabot. Caboto arrived in 1497 and claimed North America for the English sovereign while Columbus was still searching for India in the Caribbean. After three voyages to America and more than a decade of study, Columbus still believed that Cuba was a part of Asia, South America was only an island, and the coast of Central America was near the Ganges River.

Unable to celebrate Columbus' exploration as a great discovery, some apologists now want to commemorate it as a great "cultural encounter." Under this interpretation, Columbus becomes a sensitive genius thinking beyond his time in the passionate pursuit of knowledge and understanding. The historical record refutes this, too.

Contrary to popular legend, Columbus did not prove that the world was round; educated people had known that for centuries. The Egyptian-Greek scientist Erastosthenes, working for Alexandria and Aswan, already had measured the circumference and diameter of the world in the third century B.C. Arab scientists had developed a whole discipline of geography and measurement, and in the tenth century A.D., Al Maqdisi described the earth with 360 degrees of longitude and 180 degrees of latitude. The Monastery of St. Catherine in the Sinai still has an icon — painted 500 years before Columbus — which shows Jesus ruling over a spherical earth. Nevertheless, Americans have embroidered many such legends around Columbus, and he has become part of a secular mythology for schoolchildren. Autumn would hardly be complete in U.S. elementary schools without construction-paper replicas of the three ships that Columbus sailed to America, or without drawings of Queen Isabella pawning her jewels to finance Columbus' trip.

This myth of the pawned jewels obscures the true and more sinister story of how Columbus financed his trip. The Spanish monarch invested in his excursion, but only on the condition that Columbus would repay this investment with profit by bringing back gold, spices, and other tribute from Asia. This pressing need to repay his debt underlies the frantic tone of Columbus' diaries as he raced from one Caribbean island to the next, stealing anything of value.

After he failed to contact the emperor of China, the traders of India, or the merchants of Japan, Columbus decided to pay for his voyage in the one important commodity he had found in ample supply — human lives. He seized 1,200 Taino Indians from the island of Hispaniola, crammed as many onto his ships as would fit, and sent them to Spain, where they were paraded naked through the streets of Seville and sold as slaves in 1495. Columbus tore children from their parents, husbands from wives. On board Columbus' slave ships, hundreds died; the sailors tossed the Indian bodies into the Atlantic.

Because Columbus captured more Indian slaves than he could transport to Spain in his small ships, he put them to work in mines and plantations which he, his family, and followers created throughout the Caribbean. His marauding band hunted Indians for sport and profit — beating, raping, torturing, killing, and then using the Indian bodies as food for their hunting dogs. Within four years of Columbus' arrival on Hispaniola, his men had killed or exported one-third of the original Indian population of 300,000.

This was the great cultural encounter initiated by Christopher Columbus. This is the event celebrated each year on Columbus Day. The United States honors only two men with federal holidays bearing their names. In January we commemorate the birth of Martin Luther King, Jr., who struggled to lift the blinders of racial prejudice and to cut the remaining bonds of slavery in America. In October, we honor Christopher Columbus, who opened the Atlantic slave trade and launched one of the greatest waves of genocide known in history.
The Essay has also been published using this title: Honoring Columbus honors legacy of slave-trading, genocide

Note
Jack Weatherford is Professor of Anthropology at Macalaster College in St. Paul, Minnesota. He is author of Indian Givers: How the Indians of the Americas Transformed the World and several other books, and he has appeared on "The Today Show," "ABC Evening News with Peter Jennings," "Larry King," "All Things Considered," and other TV and radio programs. The essay above is adapted from an article Professor Weatherford wrote in 1989 for the Baltimore Evening Sun. Essay copyright © 2002, Jack Weatherford.

 Picture of Sojourner Truth

An Essay: on Pensacola's History and Outmoded Flags

An Op Ed by William Sloan and Christopher "Scott" Satterwhite

Government display of Confederate flags is an affront to descendants of the people who were enslaved under the Confederacy and odious to all who care. The issue, however, as you will see below, goes beyond the mere question of which oppressive flag not to fly.    The "Battle Flag," at least, flew mostly over ordinary men (few women) who somehow believed that their society depended on going to war. But that flag came to be used to glamorize the Southern cause, and we all know, to accompany act after act of bigotry and violence. The national flag, the "Stars and Bars," is worse yet. It was hoisted over the halls of power by rich, educated and elite men (few women). Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens declared that the new government "rested upon the great truth that subordination to the superior white race—is the negro's natural and normal condition." Hence, Confederate flags are the only flag among Pensacola's "Five Flags" based solely on racism.

The oft-repeated statement that the Civil War was fought over "States' Rights" is baloney. Indeed, the southern states were induced to ratify the Constitution itself, in 1787, by making three-fifths of persons "not free" count in a state's population. Slaves thus involuntarily added thirty-eight percent to Southern power to elect a House and President favoring their own slavery. The South gained in, or won outright, many hard-fought political and judicial battles over extension of slavery and forcible return of escaped slaves. The 1854 Kansas-Missouri Act extended slavery to the then-northwest states. The Republican Party was organized in response. In secession, Southern Governors cited slavery and fear of "Black Republicans."

I do not deny the valor, fortitude or military skill of the men who fought under the Battle Flag. Admiration and Southern heritage, however, do not validate the rightness of their cause.  Indeed, only three months before Lee surrendered an exhausted army, Confederate political leaders, in their vanity, rejected Lincoln's face-to-face invitation to restore the Union with compensation for emancipated slaves.

What flags, then, if any? There is no monument to celebrate the courage and fortitude of the Slaves who labored in Pensacola, as elsewhere, in humiliating captivity. People who strived, without a flag of any kind, for their own human dignity and to keep families intact in ways we rarely hear of and might not understand if we did.

There is more. People were enslaved under all of Pensacola's five flags. In 1559, de Luna brought Slaves from Africa and the recently-subjugated Aztec people. In the interest of human rights, all these people need to be remembered – again, by their own cultural standards.

There is more still. Native Americans had lived in the Pensacola area for centuries before the Spaniards arrived. Are we to think that the history of Pensacola and Escambia County began just 450 years ago? Are we to think that any flag we've seen represents them?

On December 21 we heard 150 voices, black, white and more, confronting the News Journal from Palafox Street for its misguided editorial in favor of a flying a Confederate flag. But, we have more to change than just an editorial. Measures of the kind I advocate demand an inclusive vision of the history of Pensacola and Escambia County and a painful effort to discard some of our mythology. The benefits will far outweigh the work of bringing about a fresh vision. Pensacola, and News Journal, get on board and get to work!