Meanwhile, in Baltimore, 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.” This is one Baltimore resident, explaining why the statue was targeted, in a video posted online.

Baltimore resident: “We’re walking to the oldest monument to Christopher Columbus in North America. Christopher Columbus symbolizes the 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. Racist monuments to slave owners and murderers have always bothered me.”