Columbus could return to Grant Park, but what about other ‘problematic’ public monuments?

It was something of a surprise that Mayor Lori Lightfoot announced the Christopher Columbus statue — removed by the city and sent into storage two years ago after protestors defaced the monument and tried to rip it down themselves — would be returned to its Grant Park pedestal.

Lightfoot said Monday she “fully expects” Columbus’s return, accompanied by a new security plan aimed at preventing the site from becoming a violent flashpoint between police and protestors, as was the case during the city’s civil unrest following the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police in the summer of 2020.

The mayor said Chicago residents “care deeply about” the city’s “legacy” statues, such as the Grant Park Columbus.

Given that, we figured the statue’s fate — along with those of two other Columbus figures that were taken up from the South Chicago and Little Italy neighborhoods and sent into hiding — would be made public as recommendations from Lightfoot’s Chicago Monuments Project advisory committee, a panel put together after the Grant Park Columbus melee.

The 30-member committee of artists, educators, elected officials and civic players was tasked with assessing the Columbus statue and other public art on city property, then developing a list of potentially racially or socially divisive works — along with recommendations for what should happen with (or to) the art.

But after nearly two years, no report from the committee has been made public. And now the poster child for the whole process — the Grant Park Columbus — might see the light of day again, while there’s no word yet on what the administration thinks should happen to the other 41 works around the city that the monuments committee found as potentially problematic.

It looks as though Lightfoot, who promised a transparent process for the monuments, is being opaque once again.

‘What’s best for the city and the statues’

Ron Onesti, president of the Joint Civic Committee of Italian-Americans, told Chicago Sun-Times City Hall reporter Fran Spielman that he was glad to hear the Columbus statue would make its way back to Grant Park. He also said the Little Italy Columbus statue taken from Arrigo Park, 801 S. Loomis St., must be “part of the conversation.”

Onesti said his group has tried unsuccessfully for months to meet with Lightfoot about the Columbus statues and filed suit against the city last year to get some answers from the mayor and her team.

“This whole thing about the statues could just go away and not be spending any dollars on attorneys,” Onesti said. “Let’s just put it back. Let us be part of the planning with regard to safety and security. And then, we could still go through the process of really determining what is best for the city and the statues.”

Release the monuments committee report

The city and the monuments committee held months of open and public meetings, eliciting input and response from a wide swath of Chicagoans concerning their thoughts about the public art in question.

It was a smart move, considering how heated feelings were locally and internationally around monuments that could be associated with racism, sexism, slavery or imperialism. Chicago has no public monuments to the Confederacy, but many of the city’s artistic depictions of Native Americans, for instance, are hair-raising.

And of course, there’s Columbus, whose rank violence and cruelty to indigenous people of this hemisphere has begun to overshadow the “hero that discovered America” narrative most of us learned in grammar school.

With an advisory committee of sensitive, qualified professionals, and a process that encouraged real civic engagement, Lightfoot should’ve been open about the monuments group’s findings.

Even her announcement about the Grant Park Columbus statue is shrouded in mystery. Was it the monuments committee’s recommendation to return the sculpture to Grant Park with a security plan, or was it Lightfoot — and we’ve seen this before on other subjects — on her own, making the decision? The public should know.

The monuments committee’s report could be released before the end of April, sources tell us.

We certainly hope that’s the case. The findings deserve to be seen — and held up to a healthy dose of public scrutiny.

Send letters to letters@suntimes.com