Five years after it was splattered with red paint, toppled and dragged into a lake, the bronze statue of Christopher Columbus that stood for nearly a century in a city park in Richmond, Va., has been fished out, restored and given a new home. It now gazes out at a bocce ball court outside a Sons of Italy lodge some 300 miles away in Blauvelt, N.Y.

Boston’s marble Columbus statue was beheaded in 2020 — its second decapitation. Repaired and given to the Knights of Columbus, it was moved to the garden of a nearby church, where it now stands among religious statues.

And in Baltimore, where protesters pulled down a Columbus statue in 2020 and dumped it into the Inner Harbor, the broken pieces have been retrieved and used to guide the creation of a replica.

The culture war over Columbus statues has entered a new phase.

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Monuments celebrating the Genoese explorer and his voyages were put up across the United States in the 19th and 20th centuries by Italian American groups who saw him a symbol of ethnic pride at a time when immigrants from Italy faced persecution and discrimination. In recent decades some of those statues were vandalized by protesters outraged by Columbus’s role ushering in an era of mass colonization and oppression of Indigenous people.

Columbus statues became a battleground in the wider confrontation over public monuments in 2020 during the racial justice protests that erupted after the murder of George Floyd. In the span of four months, more than 30 were dismantled, either toppled by protesters or ordered removed by officials. Now some of those statues are finding new homes at churches, museums, Italian American social clubs and, in one case, outside a baseball stadium in New Jersey.

Many of the statues have been revived with the help of Italian American groups, who cherish Columbus as a figure their ancestors embraced as a hero of the diaspora.

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President Trump has put Columbus on a list of statues he wants included in his proposed National Garden of American Heroes. This week he said “We’re back, Italians,” after he signed a proclamation for Columbus Day, a federal holiday he has called for celebrating after some cities and states have either replaced it or supplemented it with celebrations of Indigenous Peoples’ Day.

“Before our very eyes, left-wing radicals toppled his statues, vandalized his monuments, tarnished his character, and sought to exile him from our public spaces,” the proclamation reads.

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