“The US honors 2 people with holidays bearing their names. Martin Luther King Jr, who gave his life combatting the legacy of slavery, and Christopher Columbus, who initiated it in the first place. (Confronting Columbus)”. Christopher Columbus, often known as a brave adventurer, was actually a perpetrator of genocide. Columbus Day should not be celebrated because of the horrendous behavior Columbus showed off, between the atrocities committed against the Natives and the self-absorption Columbus had, shows that he is not in fact a hero, but instead a villain.
Christopher Columbus was born on October 31, in about 1450 to a weaver and a housewife to a moderately rich family. Columbus knew from a young age that he wanted to pursue a higher education
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Thousands of Natives died at the hands of Columbus and his men. They found their way into settlements and slaughtered just about anyone who got in their way. about 40,000 natives died on the first expedition, mostly from being thrown to wild dogs, being forced into slavery, or being subjected to torture. Columbus’ main goal in all of this? He wanted to be as rich as possible, cutting off their hands if they didn’t comply with his orders to find him gold. 7,000 native children died from starvation in the 3-4 months after Columbus and his men arrived at the island. They collected pregnant women from all over the island, wagered the genders of their babies, then sliced open their bellies. It didn’t even matter if they were right or wrong about the gender of the baby, because either way the mothers were killed and the babies were thrown aside. The men also split apart Taino families into slave groups. Each white man had a posse of slaves to do work for them, and in a “fair trade” taught them all about Christianity. While many people argue that Columbus was just a man of his time, we live in the present, and in the present it is believed that one must be punished for the crimes he commits. In addition, the evidence about Columbus’ murders, rapes, slavery, and kidnapping of Native Americans show that this man was never good, and that he only really “discovered” Hispaniola for his own