The origins of Columbus Day — commemorating Italian explorer Christopher Columbus — stem from efforts to combat racism against Italian immigrants, who endured everything from racial epithets to lynch mobs when they first arrived to the United States.

Today, in the era of wokeness, Italian Americans face a new type of mob, one that seeks to ban the federal holiday celebrating Italian heritage.

Although the first recorded celebration of Columbus Day in the United States was in 1792, the holiday came to national prominence over a century later, when President Benjamin Harrison issued a proclamation on October 12, 1892, encouraging Americans to mark the day in honor of the Italian explorer.

Although Harrison’s proclamation was made on the 400th anniversary of Columbus’ voyage to the New World, his aim in recognizing the holiday in 1892 had less to do with honoring the Italian explorer and more to do with encouraging Americans to be more accepting of Italian immigrants.

That’s because the 1892 proclamation was made in the wake of one of the worst episodes of racial violence in American history — the mass lynching of Italian Americans in New Orleans in 1891 that claimed the lives of eleven Italian immigrants.

The Times editors went on to express their disgust that “utterly unfit — ragged, filthy, and verminous” Italian immigrant children would “be placed in the public primary schools among the decent children of American mechanics.”.

With anti-Italian sentiment running rampant — and Italian immigrants taking jobs in Louisiana fields to replace the recently emancipated slaves — the environment became ripe for conflict in New Orleans, where nearly 300,000 Italian immigrants would settle between 1884 to 1924.

Impassioned speakers whipped the mob into a frenzy, painting Italian immigrants as criminals who needed to be driven out of the city.

Harrison’s 1892 proclamation opened the door for Italian Americans to include themselves into “the American origin story,” and over the decades, the holiday gave Italian Americans “a formative role in the nation-building narrative,” New York Times editor Brent Staples wrote in a 2019.

In New York City alone, Italian immigrants “went to work on the growing city’s municipal works projects, digging canals, laying paving and gas lines, building bridges, and tunneling out the New York subway system.

And six Italian immigrants — known as the Piccirilli Brothers — were also responsible for carving out “many of the most significant marble sculptures in the United States,” notes the New York Public Library.

And in Cleveland, Ohio, the towering art deco statues known as the “Guardians of Traffic” — which serve as icons for the city — were carved in large part by Italian immigrants, one of whom was this reporter’s great great uncle, sculptor Domenicantonio Mastrangelo

Now, in the era of cancel culture and wokeness, Italian Americans face a new type of mob — one that seeks to scrap the federal holiday celebrating Italian immigrants and replace it with an “Indigenous Peoples’ Day,” claiming that Columbus Day offends Native American communities