A blue field, a white flag with a swallowtail, the city's name on a curved scroll. Columbus's flag, adopted in 1929, drapes itself in the prestige of the navigator whose name it bears. But its colors borrow from another flag, that of Genoa, Christopher Columbus's birthplace.
For the city has built itself entirely around that name. Founded in 1812 to serve as the capital of Ohio, planted on the banks of the Scioto, it chose the explorer as its patron at the height of the American cult of Columbus. In 1955, it even erected a replica of the Santa María on the river, and a bronze statue of the navigator stood before City Hall.
In 2020, amid the reexamination of the colonial figure, Columbus removed that statue, the city stripped of the very man who gave it its name and its flag.
The swallowtail flag still flies, unchanged, over a capital that now wears its name like an open question. The emblem celebrates a navigator the city is no longer sure it wishes to honor.