A statue of civil rights activist and Congressman John Lewis was erected on Friday in front of a district court in Georgia on a site where a Confederate monument has stood for over 100 years.
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 to remove the Confederate Memorial, a 30-foot-tall stone obelisk. In 2019, a plaque was added saying the monument promoted white supremacy, and in 2020, the obelisk was removed.
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 through the South in 1961 to protest racial 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 led hundreds of protesters across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, in 1965 to demand voting rights. During the Selma march, a police officer smashed Lewis in the skull with a baton after officers attacked the nonviolent protesters.
The statue of Lewis, created by artist Basil Barrington Watson, who was born in Kingston, Jamaica, and moved to Georgia in 2002, will be officially unveiled on August 24.
The sculpture stands where a Confederate monument was erected by the United Daughters of the Confederacy in 1908. The organization was behind the construction of Confederate monuments and memorials and played a key role in spreading the “Lost Cause” narrative of the Civil War, which downplays or ignores the role of slavery as a cause of the war.
The obelisk was one of at least 230 Confederate symbols that were removed, relocated or renamed after Black man George Floyd was killed by a white police officer in Minneapolis in 2020.
Amid calls to dismantle the obelisk in Decatur, a DeKalb County judge ruled in June 2020 that it was a public nuisance and should be removed and stored.
Local groups have previously called for the monument’s removal, including in 2017 after a woman was killed protesting a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, but officials said state law prohibits them from removing it.
In 2019, the DeKalb County Board of Commissioners placed a plaque near the monument explaining the context of the monument and saying it “reinforced white supremacy and faulty historiography.”
“This and similar monuments were also created to intimidate African Americans and limit their full participation in the social and political life of their communities,” the plaque reads.
After Lewis died of pancreatic cancer in July 2020, a task force met in Georgia to decide how to honor him, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported.
Several groups proposed erecting a statue of Lewis where the Confederate obelisk had stood, and the task force agreed. County commissioners unanimously approved the plan in January 2021, and the search for an artist began.
After his death, tributes to Lewis were held across the country, including at a high school in Virginia named after Confederate General Robert E. Lee, now called John R. Lewis High School.
This article originally appeared in the New York Times.
