MESSAGE FROM THE STATE THIRD VICE PRESIDENT

COLUMBUS DAY 2024

More than 500 years after he “discovered” the New World—kicking off centuries of exploration and colonization of the Americas—Christopher Columbus is honored with a federal holiday on the second Monday of every October. However, as historians have continued to dig into the life of Christopher Columbus, controversy has arisen over continuing to honor the Italian explorer as a hero.

Today his historic legacy as a daring explorer who discovered the New World has been challenged. The rewriting of the historical record of his voyages, that launched centuries of European exploration and colonization of the American continents, has been changed to meaning of his encounters, in the Caribbean and South America triggering centuries of exploitation!

So while Christopher Columbus did not “discover” the Americas, nor was he even the first European to visit the “New World.” (Viking explorer Leif Erikson had sailed to Greenland and Newfoundland in the 11th century.) and who is to say, someone else might have done the same thing, just a few years later!

However, his journey kicked off centuries of expansionism on the American continents. The Columbian Exchange transferred people, animals, food and disease across all cultures. Old World wheat became an American food staple. African coffee and Asian sugar cane became cash crops for Latin America, while American foods like corn, tomatoes and potatoes were introduced into European diets.

In October we celebrate as proud Italian Americans, those whose courage and character reflect and help define our Nation. When In 1891, 11 Italian Americans were murdered in one of the largest mass lynchings in our Nation’s history.

In the wake of this horrific attack, President Benjamin Harrison established the Columbus Day holiday in 1892.

A dozen years later, The Order Sons of Italy in America was born, and from that it’s been changed to The Order Sons & Daughters of Italy in America!

In 1905, the OSDIA organization was created from a vision of an organization, that would help the newly arriving immigrants, coming from all parts of Italy, with someplace to socialize with other Italians, and to learn from them the ways of their new homeland, and to show the non Italians, that any fears they had of them were unfounded!

His legacy as an explorer, (which frankly was what most every ships captains did in those times) has his biggest distracters saying he’s to blamed for causing the spread of deadly European diseases amongst the native population, but if you dig into it, there were also diseases spread to the Europeans who arrived, long after Columbus!

Thus was the sentiment of this nation 133 years ago, and the newly established one in the present day, boy have things changed in so many ways!