Statue of John Lewis Replaces a Confederate Memorial in Georgia

A statue of John Lewis, the civil rights leader and congressman, was installed on Friday in front of a Georgia county courthouse in a space occupied for more than 100 years by a Confederate memorial.

The 12-foot-tall bronze statue was placed in front of the DeKalb County Courthouse in Decatur, Ga., which was part of the congressional district that Mr. Lewis represented for 17 consecutive terms.

For years, activists pushed for the Confederate memorial, a 30-foot stone obelisk that had stood in the same spot as the new statue, to be removed. In 2019, a plaque was installed that said the memorial promoted white supremacy and the obelisk was removed in 2020.

Before Mr. 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 across the South in 1961 to protest 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 helped lead hundreds of demonstrators across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., in 1965 to demand voting rights. At the march in Selma, a trooper fractured Mr. Lewis’s skull with a club after troopers attacked the nonviolent demonstrators.

The statue of Mr. Lewis, sculpted by the artist Basil Barrington Watson, who was born in Kingston, Jamaica, and moved to Georgia in 2002, will officially be unveiled on Aug. 24.

The sculpture stands where a Confederate monument was put in place in 1908 by the United Daughters of the Confederacy. The organization was behind the creation of Confederate memorials and monuments and played a key role in promoting the Lost Cause narrative of the Civil War, which downplays or ignores the role of slavery as the war’s cause.

The obelisk was one of at least 230 Confederate symbols to be removed, relocated or renamed after George Floyd, a Black man, was killed by a white police officer in Minneapolis in 2020.

Amid calls to take down the obelisk in Decatur, a DeKalb County judge said in June 2020 that it was a public nuisance and should be removed and put in storage.

Local groups had previously urged for the memorial to be removed, including in 2017 after a woman was killed protesting a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Va., but officials said that state law blocked them from taking it down.

In 2019, the DeKalb County Board of Commissioners installed a plaque near the monument that provided context for the memorial and said it had “bolstered white supremacy and faulty history.”

“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,” the plaque read in part.

After Mr. Lewis died of pancreatic cancer in July 2020, a task force convened in Georgia to determine how to honor him, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported.

Several groups suggested that a statue of Mr. Lewis be erected where the Confederate obelisk had stood and the task force agreed. The county commissioners unanimously approved the plan in January 2021 and the search began for an artist.

Tributes to Mr. Lewis were made across the country after he died, including at a Virginia high school, which had been named after the Confederate general, Robert E. Lee, and is now named the John R. Lewis High School.