Lewis represented the Atlanta area in Congress for 34 years, until his death in 2020. As it happens, he died about a month after a century-old Confederate monument had been removed from the DeKalb County courthouse in Decatur. Now, a 12-foot statue of Lewis stands in its place.
Many of those who gathered in the courthouse square on Saturday described the statue as a marker of how far their community has come since the days when Coretta Scott King, the wife of Martin Luther King Jr., described DeKalb County as “Klan Country.”
“The replacement of a monument to the Confederacy with a statue of John Lewis is a great symbol,” Vice President Kamala Harris wrote in a letter that was read at the unveiling.
Lewis, who co-founded the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, was the last surviving speaker from the 1963 March on Washington, famous for King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. Lewis was nearly beaten to death during a march for voting rights in Selma, Ala., in 1965. That event led directly to passage of the federal Voting Rights Act.
“He crossed the bridge and built the bridge at the same time, and all of us are standing on the other side of that bridge,” Georgia Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock, who was Lewis’ pastor at Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, said on Saturday.
Even during his lifetime, the quiet, gentle Lewis was sometimes described as a secular saint and often called the “conscience of the Congress.” Since his death, congressional Democrats have named a bill after Lewis to restore parts of the Voting Rights Act struck down by the Supreme Court.
“We’re going from celebrating slavery to celebrating somebody who worked to keep us free, John Lewis,” said Larry Johnson, a former DeKalb County commissioner. "He was a person who connected the dots around all generations and brought all races together. And you don't get many people like that in a lifetime."
Passage of the John Lewis Voting Rights Act has been blocked by congressional Republicans. Although many speakers spoke about the importance of continuing Lewis’ work in expanding civil and voting rights, the event sometimes took on an openly partisan flavor, with notable numbers of people in the crowd wearing T-shirts supporting Harris’ presidential bid and some speakers calling for her election in November.
Removing a Confederate Symbol
In the last decade, a number of Southern states took steps to protect Confederate monuments, which were being derided, defaced and in some cases removed as symbols of hate and white supremacy. In 2019, Georgia joined their ranks, with GOP Gov. Brian Kemp signing a law that states, "No publicly owned monument honoring Confederate soldiers shall be relocated, removed or altered in any fashion."
That didn’t stop the protests in Decatur. Especially after white supremacists rallied in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017, high school and college students, among other people, held their own rallies in Decatur, demanding the removal of the Confederate obelisk.
Many of them were younger than Lewis had been as a student activist, noted DeKalb County CEO Michael Thurmond. “Some of us adults thought it wasn’t possible because the Georgia legislature said it wasn’t legal to move a Confederate monument,” Thurmond said on Saturday. “But for those young people, there would be no place to put this statue [of Lewis].”
In 2020, DeKalb County Judge Clarence Seeliger approved a request from the city of Decatur to order the Confederate obelisk removed, as a threat to public safety. Seeliger wrote that this was for the monument’s own protection. “The Confederate obelisk has become an increasingly frequent target of graffiti and vandalism, a figurative lightning rod for friction among citizens, and a potential catastrophe that could happen at any time if individuals attempt to forcibly remove or destroy it,” Seeliger wrote.
Thurmond arranged for the obelisk to be removed on the Juneteenth holiday in 2020. DeKalb had been the first county in Georgia to honor Juneteenth, which commemorates the end of slavery, as an official holiday.
A task force led by city and county officials raised $700,000 in private funds to pay for the statue of Lewis, by sculptor Basil Watson, which depicts him holding his hands over his heart in a gesture of love.
“Your legacy is longer than your life,” the Rev. Dr. Jamal Bryant said during the invocation.
Grappling With the Past
Between the courthouse and Decatur City Hall, a plaque commemorates several local lynchings that occurred in the 19th and 20th centuries. In 1960, Martin Luther King was arrested and jailed in Decatur on a trumped-up charge. Pulled over while driving a white woman for cancer treatment, he was charged with driving without a license, even though he held a valid license from Alabama.
The population of DeKalb County is 52 percent Black. Both the county and the city of Decatur have tried in various ways to grapple with their racist past. Two years ago, a middle school a few blocks from the courthouse that had been named after a segregationist was renamed in honor of a local community where formerly enslaved African Americans had settled.
Removing “horrible remnants of our history” is important, said Gerald Griggs, president of the Georgia NAACP. Along with many others in the crowd, Griggs brought his young child to witness Saturday’s unveiling.
“The community’s changed a lot,” Griggs says. “You drive down the street right in front of the courthouse and you see ‘Black lives matter’ on the street, and you start seeing policies that reflect the real beliefs of DeKalb County.”
Griggs, along with several speakers at the event, expressed the belief that although the community, the state and the nation have come a long way in recent decades in promoting freedom and equality, they still have a long way to go.
Still, no one denied the importance of what Lewis and his generation had accomplished.
“All I can say is I'm thankful for what he has done — his legacy that he has left,” said DeKalb County resident Laura Hill. “And I'm grateful that he was man enough to stand up and fight for his people.”
