Since 1937, Columbus Day has been set aside each year to reflect on the discovery of the Americas.
While this still holds as the official reason for the U.S. holiday, thousands of Americans have taken to Twitter and the rest of the Internet to deride the holiday and call Columbus a “killer and a thief.”
Because, as one Philadelphia Inquirer columnist explains, Columbus is widely considered to be “a stubborn bumbler who brought about the deaths of tens of millions” at the behest of the Spanish crown.
South Dakota even changed the name of the holiday from Columbus Day to Native Americans’ Day to remember “the great Native American leaders who contributed so much to the history of our state.” And the city of Berkeley, Calif. officially changed the name to “Indigenous People’s Day.”
On Twitter, Columbus Day and Native Americans have been top trending topics all morning. Both have been mentioned more than 19,000 times in the last three hours, according to statistics from Topsy, a social media search engine.
Here’s what people had to say about the holiday on the Web.
Photo by amber.kennedy
