Statue of John Lewis (Ron Harris-AP via CNN Newsource)

*(CNN) — A statue honoring a civil rights hero and U.S. Congressman Jan Lewis was unveiled Saturday outside Atlanta, replacing a monument to the Confederacy that had stood there for more than a century.

Famed Jamaican sculptor Basil Watson created the statue and conceived the John Lewis Memorial. It was installed on August 16 in Decatur Square, in front of the Historic Decatur Courthouse.

The 11-foot-tall statue stands on a granite plinth and depicts Lewis with his hands over his heart, a gesture he often used to express his love for others.

An icon of civil rights

Lewis was a hero and a prominent leader of the civil rights movement. He was a lifelong Democrat who advocated for social issues and equality.

Lewis was one of the original Freedom Riders, who rode segregated buses in the 1960s to protest racial segregation in the South. He chaired the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and was one of the “Big Six” civil rights leaders who organized the March on Washington, where Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his historic “I Have a Dream” speech.

John Lewis in front of the Edmond Pettus Bridge in Selma Al (Jeremy Moorhead-CNN via CNN Newsource)

In 1965, Lewis was brutally beaten by police and state troopers in Alabama while leading hundreds of peaceful civil rights protesters in the first march from Selma to Montgomery, which became known as “Bloody Sunday.”

Lewis served as a United States Representative for Georgia’s 5th congressional district from 1987 until his death in 2020. In 2011, he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Barack Obama for his lifelong commitment to civil rights and equality.

Replacing a distribution symbol

A 30-foot-tall Confederate obelisk, erected by the United Daughters of the Confederacy in 1908, previously stood in Decatur Square for more than 110 years.

It contained textual inscriptions on all four sides of the base, honoring the ideals of the Confederacy. The inscriptions claimed that those who erected the monument were witnesses to the future, unaware that it would one day be torn down and replaced with a new symbol of peace and progress.

The obelisk came to national attention as a symbol of division during the racial reckoning of the summer protests in 2020 following the killing of George Floyd.

Removal of the Confederate Memorial (Ron Harris-AP via CNN Newsource)

A Georgia judge ordered the obelisk removed in June 2020, saying it was a public nuisance as a focus of protests and vandalism. Crowds cheered as a construction crew toppled the statue later that month.

“A monument that represented bigotry, division and hatred will be replaced by a monument to a man who loved, who cherished this nation and brought people of all colors together,” DeKalb County CEO Michael Thurmond said in 2022, noting that the removal of the Confederate monument in 2020 was “one of the proudest moments” of his tenure.

CNN’s Devon M. Sayers contributed to this report.

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