Chicago City Wire

Anti-white and pro "indigenous" activists painted graffiti on a statue of former President Abraham Lincoln Monday.

The vandals used red paint to deface the statue, located in Lincoln's namesake Lincoln Park," around 12:30 p.m. on Monday, or Columbus Day, Chicago police say.

The graffiti said "Dethrone the colonizers," "Avenge the Dakota 38" and "Land Back," suggesting that Lincoln Park is land that belongs to Indians who lived here before European explorers arrived.

An anonymous group of "resistors of colonial violence" issued a press release claiming credit for the graffiti. They said they opposed Columbus Day and wanted to call attention to the public execution of 38 Dakota Indian men during the U.S.-Dakota war of 1862.

The group taped pieces of paper to the Lincoln statue with names of the 38 Dakota Indians executed.

The statue, titled “Abraham Lincoln: The Man," was a work of Beaux-Arts sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens, considered at the time of its unveiling before a crowd of 10,000 on Oct. 22, 1887 to be the finest portrait statue in the U.S. 

"The outpouring of critical accolades immediately positioned it as a landmark sculpture: “the first statue of Lincoln that has yet been made” and “the finest product of American sculpture yet achieved” were frequent refrains in contemporary newspapers and journals," wrote Thayer Tolles in Metropolitan Museum Journal.

Replicas of the Lincoln statue were placed at Lincoln's tomb in Springfield and at Parliament Square in London

It was gift of Chicago lumber magnate Eli Bates.

In 2021, Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot declared the Lincoln statue to be potentially "offensive" and thus, subject to being taken down and replaced with a statue of someone less so. 

Lightfoot took down a Grant Park statue of Christopher Columbus in 2020, after anti-White activists protested it was offensive to the memory of George Floyd.

Neither Lightfoot nor Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker attended the Columbus Day parade in downtown Chicago on Monday. Both believe the holiday should be replaced with "Indigenous People's" day, honoring various Indian tribes who lived in North America before European settlers arrived.