A more than century-old statue of Christopher Columbus inside Central Park was discovered defaced on Tuesday morning, its hands stained with red paint and its pedestal scrawled with graffiti including the hashtag “#somethingscoming.”

A parks worker alerted the police to the defacement of the 1892 bronze, which stands north of the 65th Street transverse, at 7 a.m., according to the New York Police Department. On the pedestal, the words “Hate will not be tolerated” had also been written in white spray paint.

Depictions of Columbus have been swept into a national conversation about the public veneration of historical figures with controversial pasts. That debate erupted in violence last month when white supremacists protested the removal of a statue of the Confederacy’s top general, Robert E. Lee, from Charlottesville, Va., a riot that resulted in one woman’s death.

Following the removals of such statues nationwide in the aftermath, Mayor Bill de Blasio convened a commission to review of the city’s iconography for possible removal, including images of Columbus, whose 1492 voyage to the Caribbean, historians say, was at the grave cost of the indigenous people there. Mr. de Blasio has since said that the commission may decide that some images, perhaps including those of Columbus, be retrofitted with plaques that explain issues surrounding them rather than be taken down.