Monument to Late Civil Rights Icon John Lewis Replaces Confederate Memorial in Georgia – Essence

A statue of the late congressman John Lewis, known for stirring up “good trouble” in his pursuit of racial justice, was unveiled Friday. The monument replaces a controversial Confederate monument that stood outside the Georgia district courthouse from 1908 before being removed in 2020. CBS News reports.

The majestic 12-foot statue of Rep. Lewis was reportedly commissioned by internationally acclaimed sculptor Basil Barrington Watson, who was born in Kingston, Jamaica and has been based in Georgia since 2002. New York Times.

When the monument was placed in front of the Dekalb County Courthouse in Decatur, Georgia Watson looked on and told CBS News that “it was exciting to see it go up and exciting for the city because of what the monument represents and what it replaces.”

Rep. Lewis was deeply committed to civil rights long before he became a congressman, serving his Georgia district for 17 terms. He co-founded the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which grew out of student-led sit-ins that challenged Jim Crow racial segregation.

Lewis was also one in every of 13 original Freedom Riders who rode across the South to protest segregation on public transportation — and was met with unbridled violence from an offended mob. At a Greyhound bus station in Montgomery, Lewis was hit in the pinnacle with a picket box. Recalling the incident In an interview with CNN, Lewis said, “It was very violent. I thought I was going to die. I was left unconscious at the Greyhound bus station in Montgomery.”

Lewis was also the youngest person to help organize the March on Washington in 1963 and led marches throughout the 1965 election campaign in Selma. During one march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, Lewis was so brutally attacked by Alabama state troopers that his skull was fractured—an incident that scarred him for the remainder of his life. Hundreds of other peaceful protesters were also attacked, and the day became referred to as Bloody Sunday.

Segregation was a time when many states erected Confederate monuments as a method of enforcing white supremacist ideas. The 30-foot stone obelisk that replaces Rep. Lewis’s monument was installed in 1908 by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, a company liable for creating many Confederate monuments and memorials, the NY Times reported.

Local activists have been calling for the obelisk to be removed for years, including in 2017 after a white nationalist “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville that left one protester dead, at which officials said they might not remove it due to state law.

In 2019, the Dekalb County Board of Commissioners placed a plaque in front of the obelisk to provide context to its racist roots.speaking partly that it “reinforced white supremacy and a flawed history by suggesting that the cause of the Civil War was the rhetoric of Southern honor and states’ rights — rather than its true catalyst — African-American slavery.” The statue was finally removed in 2020. As it was lifted from its base, onlookers chanted, “Just drop it!” CBS News reports.

The official unveiling of the Lewis statue will happen on Saturday twenty fourth August, following its installation.