Joseph Camelia admits he didn’t know that the bust of Christopher Columbus stood in front of his hometown’s municipal building for nearly 20 years. But when he received a call at the end of June claiming protesters were going to topple it, he immediately thought of his father.

"My father came from Italy, worked 16 hours a day, seven days a week, and now you want to take some of our heritage and take it away? And I thought, 'I don’t think so,' " recalled Camelia, 79, who joined a group of counterprotesters who rallied around the bust. "They could have killed me, for all I care — that’s how much I believed in it," he said.