Statue of John Lewis unveiled in Georgia to honor late civil rights leader

A 12ft-tall statue of John Lewis was unveiled in Georgia on Saturday morning, honoring the legacy of the civil rights leader and congressman who died in 2020.

The statue stands in Decatur Square outside the historic Decatur courthouse in outer Atlanta, in a district Lewis represented in Congress from 1987 to his death. Lewis was 80 when he died due to complications related to pancreatic cancer.

The statue replaces a Confederate obelisk that was originally erected in 1908 and was taken down in June 2020 amid the Black Lives Matter protests that spread across the country after the murder of George Floyd.

Related: ‘He’d been through the fire’: John Lewis, civil rights giant, remembered

“It’s exciting to see it going up and exciting for the city because of what he represents and what it’s replacing,” Basil Watson, the sculptor who made the statue, told the Associated Press .

Lewis was a key figure in the civil rights movement as a leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which led protests across the south. He was one of several protesters who were brutally beaten by police during a peaceful march of 600 people across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, in 1965, a day that was termed “Bloody Sunday” for the police’s violent crackdown against protesters that day.

Lewis was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2011 by then president Barack Obama for his role in the civil rights movement and as a congressman.

The statue portrays Lewis with his hands over his heart, a gesture Michael Collins, who served as Lewis’s chief of staff for 21 years, said “meant so much to him because he just wanted to thank everybody”.

“That was a way … of showing love to everybody. And so that’s why this is so fitting of a posture for the congressman, to be saying: ‘Thank you, I love you,’” Collins told local newspaper Decaturish in 2022, when the statue was first commissioned.

The former Confederate obelisk was often vandalized by protesters, who long called for its removal. The monument was erected in 1908 by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, a group that often memorialized leaders of the Ku Klux Klan.

An inscription at the former obelisk, written by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, read: “To the memory of the soldiers and sailors of the Confederacy, of whose virtues in peace and in war are witnesses to the end that justice may be done and that the truth perish not.”

A total of 33 Confederate statues were removed in multiple states in 2021 and 2022, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which advocates for the removal of Confederate monuments and symbols.