Workers placed a bronze statue of the late Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) on the grounds of the Dekalb County Courthouse Friday — the same site where a Confederate monument was removed in 2020.
Internationally acclaimed sculptor Basil Watson, who designed the 12-foot-tall statue, watched as the statue was placed ahead of its official unveiling planned for Aug. 24.
“It’s exciting to see it going up and exciting for the city because of what he represents and what it’s replacing,” Watson told The Associated Press.
Lewis, who represented Georgia in Congress for over three decades, first rose to national prominence during the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s when he urged others to get into “good trouble.” He also led the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) during the protests and was a confidante of Civil Rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr.
The late congressman was beaten during a march in Selma, Ala., on the Edmund Pettus Bridge alongside many other civil rights leaders.
Lewis died in 2020 after succumbing to pancreatic cancer and was laid in state in the Capitol, an honor reserved for very few.
Groups like the Beacon Hill Black Alliance for Human Rights and Hate Free Decatur pushed for the monument to be removed since white supremacists marched through Charlottesville, Va., in 2017.
“It is our hope that because our youth played such an essential role in the removal of the [Confederate] monument, that a statue of the young John Lewis during his [younger] years will be erected in the Decatur square,” the group said during the 2021 deliberations.
The former Confederate monument became a flashpoint during the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 after the police killing of George Floyd, and the city of Decatur asked a Georgia judge to order the removal of the monument after it was regularly vandalized and marked with graffiti. At the time, the city said the monument had become a threat to public safety.
Another statue of Lewis has also replaced Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens in the U.S. Capitol on behalf of the state of Georgia. Stephens infamously made the Cornerstone Speech, calling slavery foundational to the Confederacy.
Each state sends statutes of two notable citizens of their state to honor in the Capitol.
Democrats have rallied around honoring Lewis’s legacy through statues and monuments and the passage of the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, a bill that has been a top priority for Democrats since the 2020 election.
The bill would recodify parts of the original Voting Rights Act, passed in the wake of mass demonstrations led in part by Lewis during the Civil Rights Movement, that the Supreme Court has done away with in the last decade.
The court has weakened the nondiscrimination portion of the act, which allowed for the federal government to oversee state voting rules.