Aug. 24 (UPI) – A 12-foot-tall bronze statue of the late civil rights leader and U.S. Representative John Lewis was unveiled Saturday in Decatur, Georgia.
Lewis represented Georgia’s Fifth Congressional District, which includes most of Atlanta, from 1987 until his death in 2020.
Jamaican sculptor Basil Watson created the statue, which shows Lewis holding his hands in front of his heart and standing on a stone plinth.
The statue was placed in Decatur Square on August 16 and unveiled on Saturday.
Lewis was a civil rights activist and Democrat who was among the first “Freedom Riders” who rode on segregated buses in the 1960s to protest racial discrimination and segregation in the South.
Lewis was a former chair of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and a member of the six major civil rights leaders who organized the historic March on Washington, during which Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech.
In 1965, Alabama State Police and local police officers physically beat Lewis, sparking the first Selma to Montgomery march.
President Barack Obama awarded Lewis the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2011 for his commitment to equality and civil rights.
The statue replaces a 30-foot-tall stone obelisk that was erected in front of the DeKalb County Courthouse in 1908.
It was erected by the United Daughters of the Confederacy and honored the “memory of the soldiers and sailors of the Confederacy, whose virtues bear witness in peace and war that justice may be done and truth not perish.”
The obelisk contained inscriptions on all four sides that referred to the basic principles of the Confederacy.
The obelisk became a point of contention during the unrest following the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020.
