A statue of John Lewis, the civil rights leader and congressman, was installed Friday in front of a Georgia county courthouse in a space occupied for more than 100 years by a Confederate memorial.
The 12-foot-tall bronze statue was placed in front of the DeKalb County Courthouse in Decatur, Georgia, which was part of the congressional district that Lewis represented for 17 consecutive terms.
For years, activists pushed for the Confederate memorial, a 30-foot stone obelisk, to be removed. In 2019, a plaque was installed that said the memorial promoted white supremacy and the obelisk was removed in 2020.
Before Lewis, a Democrat, was elected to Congress, he had risked his life for the Civil Rights Movement. He was one of the original 13 Freedom Riders who rode buses across the South in 1961 to protest segregation on public transportation and was a founder of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which coordinated sit-ins.
He helped organize the March on Washington and helped lead hundreds of demonstrators across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, in 1965 to demand voting rights. At the march in Selma, a trooper fractured Lewis’ skull with a club after troopers attacked the nonviolent demonstrators.
The statue of Lewis, sculpted by artist Basil Barrington Watson, who was born in Kingston, Jamaica, and moved to Georgia in 2002, will officially be unveiled Aug. 24.
The sculpture stands where a Confederate monument was put in place in 1908 by the United Daughters of the Confederacy. The organization was behind the creation of Confederate memorials and monuments and played a key role in promoting the Lost Cause narrative of the Civil War, which downplays or ignores the role of slavery as the war’s cause.
After Lewis died of pancreatic cancer in July 2020, a task force convened in Georgia to determine how to honor him, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported.
Several groups suggested that a statue of Lewis be erected where the Confederate obelisk had stood and the task force agreed.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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