A bronze statue of the late civil rights icon Rep. John Lewis has been erected outside the DeKalb County Courthouse in Georgia, replacing a Confederate monument that stood there for 112 years.
Standing 12 feet tall, the statue of Lewis was created by sculptor Basil Watson. It was installed on Friday and will be officially unveiled on Aug. 24.
An obelisk commemorating the Confederacy had been on the site from 1908 to 2020. For years, the Beacon Hill Black Alliance for Human Rights, a local group advocating for Black residents in Decatur, had campaigned for the obelisk’s removal, but state law prevented the local government from doing so.
In 2019, the group successfully pushed for a plaque to be placed nearby to provide context for the monument. The plaque read:
Located in a prominent public space, its presence bolstered white supremacy and faulty history, suggesting that the cause for the Civil War rested on southern honor and states’ rights rhetoric — instead of its real catalyst — African-American slavery. This monument and similar ones also were created to intimidate African-Americans and limit their full participation in the social and political life of their communities.
As racial justice protests swept the country in 2020 and local governments and institutions in the South reassessed their tributes to the Confederacy, a DeKalb County judge ordered the obelisk’s removal, saying it had “become a public nuisance.” More than 100 Confederate monuments were removed that year, a study found.
A task force created shortly after was assigned to oversee replacing the Confederate monument with one honoring Lewis.
A leader of the Civil Rights Movement, Lewis represented the Atlanta area in the House from the time he was first elected in 1986. In an interview with The Washington Post one month before his death, he told Black Lives Matter protesters, “You must be able and prepared to give until you cannot give any more.”
Lewis died in July 2020 at 80 years old after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. At the time, he was one of the most prominent members of the House and the longest-serving member of the Congressional Black Caucus.
