Keep Columbus statue at Marconi Plaza. Add another honoring Native Americans.

According to Native American and progressive activists, Christopher Columbus was a genocidal warrior who helped spark centuries of slavery, racism, and imperialism. To many Italian Americans, by contrast, he remains a symbol of bravery and pride in the face of oppression.

Guess what? They’re both right.

That’s why, instead of removing Columbus from Marconi Plaza, we should add a second statue. And we already have a great candidate, right here in Philadelphia: the statue of Lenni-Lenape chief Tamanend, which is currently languishing near the I-95 entrance at Front and Market Streets.

Moving Tamanend to Marconi would put him front and center, where he belongs. And it would also place our national reckoning over race and history in vivid display.

Moving Tamanend to Marconi would put him front and center, where he belongs.

The term reckoning has been part of our national lexicon since the 2020 police murder of George Floyd, which triggered widespread demands to appraise racism in America and to hold the nation to account for it.

It also led to the removal of many statues, which were suddenly judged too racist to remain. Across the country, dozens of Confederate memorials came down. Here in Philadelphia, officials removed a statue of former Mayor Frank Rizzo — a notorious racist and homophobe — from a plaza adjoining City Hall.

That doesn’t sound like a reckoning to me. It sweeps our ugly history under the rug, where we don’t have to address it.

Witness the fate of the Columbus statue in Marconi Plaza. Officials encased it in a plywood box while awaiting word from the Philadelphia Art Commission, which voted to remove it. After yearslong legal battles, the Pennsylvania Commonwealth Court ordered the city to remove the box earlier this month.

» READ MORE: Philadelphia’s Christopher Columbus statue is out of its box, and so is the hard truth we still must address

So there Columbus stands, out in the open again, in all of his (take your pick) glory or perfidy. The city is reviewing the court decision about the box, which it might appeal. Meanwhile, it will explore “adding a plaque or signage . . . that recontextualizes Columbus’ complex history,” spokesperson Kevin Lessard said recently.

That would be all for the good, of course. But it would be even better to add the statue of Chief Tamanend, who welcomed William Penn to this region in 1682 and supposedly entered into the famous “Treaty of Amity and Friendship” with him. (There is no paper record of the event.)

According to legend, Tamanend also declared that the Lenni-Lenape and their new neighbors would “live in peace as long as the waters run in the rivers and creeks and as long as the stars and moon endure.” Obviously, that didn’t happen. If Tamanend’s statue was set side by side with Columbus, visitors would have to grapple with the reality of Native American displacement and — yes — genocide, by Columbus and many others.

But they would also learn about discrimination against Italian Americans, who invoked Columbus to rebut it. In New York, for example, the inscription on the 1892 statue in Columbus Circle — erected a year after 11 Italian Americans were lynched by a mob in New Orleans — noted that Italians were “scoffed at,” “menaced,” and “chained.”

Like the New York memorial, Philadelphia’s Columbus statue was funded by Italian Americans. Its first home was Fairmount Park, where it was erected as part of the city’s 1876 centennial celebration. It was moved to Marconi Plaza 100 years later, during America’s bicentennial commemoration.

Imagine how much more we would all learn — about all of these histories — if we moved the Tamanend statue there, too. We could build an entirely new Native American memorial for the plaza, as several commentators have suggested. But why do that, when we already have one?

That wouldn’t preclude affixing Tamanend’s name to Penn Treaty Park, which should have happened long ago. But it would rescue his statue from Front Street, where visitors have to cross freeway-bound traffic to get a good look at him.

So let’s put Tamanend next to Columbus in Marconi Plaza, where everyone can see both of them. And let the real reckoning begin.

Jonathan Zimmerman teaches education and history at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of “Whose America? Culture Wars in the Public Schools,” which was published in a revised 20th-anniversary edition earlier this year by the University of Chicago Press.