A tribute to the late civil rights hero, Rep. John Lewis, will be replacing a long-standing Confederate monument formerly situated outside of the DeKalb County courthouse in Atlanta.
What We Know:
- DeKalb County commissioners approved the resolution last Tuesday after Commissioner Mereda Davis Johnson and Decatur Mayor Patti Garrett assembled a task force last fall to determine the best way to honor Lewis.
“John was a giant of a man with a humble heart,” Johnson told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution (AJC). “He met no strangers and he truly was a man who loved the people and who loved his country, which he represented very well. He deserves this honor.”
- Lewis’ monument will be built in the DeKalb County Confederate Monument’s former spot, a 30-foot stone obelisk called “The Lost Cause” that was removed in June 2020 in the middle of the night after a judge declared it “a public nuisance.”
- “The Lost Cause” was erected in 1908 by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, according to the Associated Press. A marker added last September says the monument was erected to “glorify the ‘lost cause’ of the Confederacy” and has “bolstered white supremacy and faulty history.”
- The late Representative was one of the “big six” leaders of the civil rights movement and was the last surviving speaker present at the 1963 March on Washington where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech. He also led the historic march from Selma to Alabama in 1965 and served to represent Georgia’s 5th Congressional District since 1985. Lewis died in July 2020 after a strenuous battle with pancreatic cancer.
- Advocacy groups such as the Beacon Hill Black Alliance for Human Rights and Hate Free Decatur are largely responsible for the removal of the confederate display. They are now being credited with the design of the new monument. As reported by the AJC, it has been proposed that the statue depicts a young Lewis in the trench coat and backpack he wore while crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, in 1965.
After the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor in early 2020, many state governments have made the sound decision to remove monuments dedicated to the Confederacy.
