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A memorial to late civil rights icon and Georgia lawmaker John Lewis will replace a Confederate monument previously on display in the Atlanta area, officials announced this week.
The activist-turned-representative — one of the “big six” leaders of the civil rights movement —died in July 2020after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in December 2019. He was 80.
The station reports that, in June 2020, the confederate monument was removed from the town square in the middle of the night after a judge declared it “a public nuisance,” undercutting a Georgia law that dictates “no publicly owned monument honoring Confederate soldiers” may be relocated or removed.
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“This feels great. This is a people’s victory. All of our young people from Decatur High School that made this happen. All of these organizers, everybody came together,” Mawuli Davis, the head of the alliance, told the AP upon the monument’s removal. “This is it. This is a victory for this country. This is an example of what can happen when people work together.”
According to theEqual Justice Initiative, though there were only 11 states in the Confederacy — but 31 of the 50 states in America contain monuments dedicated to it.
In 1963, he was the youngest speaker at the March on Washington where King Jr. delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech.
Lewis was also a leader at the march in Selma, Alabama, on March 7, 1965, which led to the eventual passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
He was elected to Congress in 1986, where he served as U.S. Representative of Georgia’s 5th Congressional District until his death.
source: people.com
