A large bronze statue of the late civil rights leader and Congressman John Lewis was erected in Decator, Georgia, on Friday. The statue was intended to replace a controversial Confederate monument that was removed in 2020.
Lewis was known as a leader of the civil rights movement and represented the Atlanta metropolitan area in the House of Representatives when he was first elected in 1986.
“You have to be able and willing to give until you can give no more,” Lewis said in an interview with the Washington Post a month before his death in July 2020, encouraging Black Lives Matter protesters.
Related articles
At the time of his death, Lewis was one of the most prominent members of the House of Representatives and the longest-serving member of the Congressional Black Caucus. When faced with difficult but necessary issues, Lewis famously urged citizens to get into “good trouble.”
The 12-foot-tall bronze statue in his honour was created by sculptor Basil Watson and will be officially unveiled on August 24.
“It’s exciting to see it come to life and exciting for the city because of what it represents and what it replaces,” Watson told the Related Press during installation.
The Confederate Obelisk, erected by the United Daughters of the Confederacy in 1908, stood on the town square for 112 years until it was removed in 2020.
After a deadly white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, organizations such as the Beacon Hill Black Alliance for Human Rights and Hate Free Decatur called for the obelisk’s removal, but state law prevented the local government from taking action.
The group was successful in getting a plaque placed nearby in 2019 clarifying the monument’s context. But it wasn’t until 2020, when protests for racial justice erupted nationwide following the police killing of George Floyd, that Southern institutions reconsidered their long-standing honoring of the Confederacy.
The city asked a Georgia judge to order the obelisk’s removal because the monument was the target of vandalism and graffiti and posed a threat to public safety.
In 2020 alone, nearly 100 Confederate monuments were removed in the United States, but hundreds still stand.
A working group oversaw the replacement of the Confederate monument with a monument honoring Lewis.
