A large statue of late civil rights leader Rep. John Lewis was installed in Decatur, Ga., Friday, taking the spot in the city's town square where a monument to the confederacy had stood for more than 110 years before it was taken down in 2020.
"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, an internationally acclaimed sculptor commissioned to create the statue, told NBC News.
The bronze statue of Lewis is 12 feet tall and will be officially unveiled to the community on Aug. 24.
Lewis, a longtime Democrat lawmaker, was well known for his leadership during the civil rights movement, and for encouraging people to not fear being in "good trouble" for the cause.
He died in July 2020 at the age of 80 and represented Georgia's 5th Congressional District from 1987 until his death.
Protesters in DeKalb County, where the Confederate monument had stood for so long, invoked his call for good trouble while calling for the obelisk to be removed.
The original monument had been erected in 1908 by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, but groups such as the Beacon Hill Black Alliance for Human Rights and Hate Free Decatur had been pushing it to be brought down since 2017, when people were killed at a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.
It and other monuments honoring the confederacy also became the center of protests after the death of George Floyd in 2020 in Minneapolis.
The city of Decatur asked a Georgia judge to order that the monument be removed, noting that it was often vandalized and had become a threat to the local public's safety.
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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