On August 25, 2017, progressive activist Wintana Melekin created a petition for the Columbus statue outside of the State Capitol in St. Paul Minnesota to be replaced by a Prince Statue. This petition has gained a substantial following of over 5,000 Minnesotans signed and still rising! So Americans are asking, why are people asking for this? The following reasons may be what some people are thinking when they signed this petition.

– The Death Of Prince.
You probably all know this, but just in case, Prince, American singer, multi-instrumental musician, record producer, songwriter, and musical genius died on April 21 of 2016. This was a tragedy in the hearts of his friends, family, and millions of loyal fans. While he died, his music will live on in our hearts. This event influenced this statue the most, in this reporter’s opinion anyway. If Prince hadn’t died, then the mere thought of immortalizing him in statue form probably wouldn’t have come up for a long time.

– Christopher Columbus is a Bad Person.

Regardless of what he discovered (which he didn’t, Vikings and the Native Americans got there first), Christopher Columbus is, overall, a pretty bad dude. He systematically enslaved and murdered the indigenous people, also known as the Native Americans. He was estimated to have eradicated anywhere from one million to eight million in mass genocide. The only reason that he wanted to go to America was to get slaves and gold from Asia, so America wasn’t even his first goal (if you are unsettled by unusual and violent tactics of Columbus and his crew, I would suggest skipping to the next paragraph). In the province of Cicao in Haiti, which is where Columbus and his men thought that there were massive fields of gold sprawling the landscape, he enslaved Native Americans as young as fourteen or older to harvest a certain quantity of gold in three months. When the slaves brought the gold, they were given copper tokens to hang around their own necks. Slaves without tokens had their hands cut off and were left to bleed to death.

– Minnesotan Values.
Across the entire United States, statues of racist slave owners are being replaced with much better statues that reflects the values and ideals of the state that they are in. Does Christopher Columbus really reflect Minnesota, a state of rights activists and people who love everything? Definitely not. So Prince is the perfect statue to reflect the views of Minnesotans everywhere. They already love him anyway, this is reflected through all of the self-guided Minneapolis tours based off of Prince, the tours of his home and studio Paisley Park, and the behind-the-scenes looks at how First Avenue and Seventh Street Entry began, which were made famous by Prince’s “Purple Rain.” Minneapolis and Minnesota as a whole is worthy enough to have a Prince statue.

If you happened to agree with me and believe that the Columbus statue in St. Paul should be replaced with a Prince statue, then click this link and sign the petition, and what do you think about what the Prince statue should look like? What album cover should it look like? This reporters opinion would be the cover of Prince’s 1984 album “Purple Rain,” with Prince on a snazzy motorcycle.