Columbus was a serial rapist.  His seventeen ships of men engaged in butchery so depraved that it is among the worst in history.   Bartolome de las Casas who accompanied Columbus wrote that the men were fondest of ten year olds for sex.   The creative ways that Columbus and his men slaughtered and enslaved Native Americans went on non-stop.  They cut off the body parts of people for nothing.  They hung people up by ropes and set their dogs on them.  They butchered babies.   They waded in blood and gore.

Historians disagree as to how many people they did this to in approximately four years, but the lowest number of people slaughtered is 200,000, all of it up close and personal.   Bartolome de las Casas said it was 4 million.   

The problem is not that Columbus was a man of his time.  The problem is that he was a psychopath, and the people of his time and ours haven't cared.   That is the problem.

We don't need monuments to psychopaths, no matter how "visionary" we think they are.