Statue of late Congressman John Lewis to be unveiled In Charleston on its way to U.S. Capitol’s Statuary Hall

CHARLESTON, SC – A statue of the late civil rights leader Congressman John Lewis will be unveiled in Charleston Feb. 3 at noon as it begins the journey to what is hoped to be its permanent location in the U.S. Capitol’s Statuary Hall in Washington, D.C. The statue will be unveiled in each of the states it passes through, and South Carolina’s unveiling, which will include remarks by S.C. Congressman James Clyburn, will be the first stop along that journey.
  The event, which is free and open to the public, will take place at the American College of the Building Arts, 649 Meeting Street, and will kick off the opening of the college’s ACBA Honors Award celebration. The award is presented annually to honor exceptional leadership and contributions in the fields of preservation and the building arts.
 This year’s award will recognize Rodney Mims Cook Jr., founding president of the National Monuments Foundation, who spearheaded the effort to place Lewis’ statue, and others honoring leaders like him, into an Atlanta park named for Cook’s father, a 20-year member of the Georgia House of Representatives and Chairman of the Republican Party who advocated for civil rights in the 1960s and ‘70s. He was a friend of Dr. Martin Luther King Sr. and Jr., as well as Lewis and other Civil Rights leaders. Lewis delivered the keynote address opening Cook Jr.’s National Monuments Foundation headquarters, the Millennium Gate Museum, in 2008.
 ACBA is honoring Cook Jr. for his leadership in advancing the use of civic art within the public realm to bring communities together for peace, reconciliation and healing.
 The Georgia Legislature recently wrote a bipartisan bill that would replace the statue of Alexander Hamilton Stephens, Vice President of the Confederacy, with a replica of Lewis’. The statue must not cost the taxpayer, and be donated by the people of Georgia. The National Monuments Foundation, based in Georgia then commissioned the statue with Lewis’ assistance and has offered it to Georgia for this purpose. Until the Georgia legislature passes this bill and the governor accepts the sculpture, Cook Jr., a United States Commissioner of Fine Arts, intends to display the sculpture in the Great Hall of the National Building Museum, the CFA headquarters in Washington.
 Each state selects two figures to represent them in the National Statuary Hall Collection. Stephens has represented Georgia since 1927.
 In 1965, Lewis, who died on July 17, 2021, at the age of 80, marched with Dr. Martin Luther King to Alabama’s city of Selma demanding voting rights. As the group came off the Edmund Pettus Bridge outside the city, state troopers began to beat them with clubs while spraying the crowd with tear gas and pepper spray. Lewis suffered a fractured skull in the incident. He later went on to represent Georgia for more than three decades in Congress, where he continued to fight for equal rights through nonviolent advocacy. He is the first Black American to lie in state in the rotunda of the U.S. Capitol.
 Cook selected Chicago Art Institute trained sculptor Gregory Johnson to create the original bronze statue that stands in the Rodney Mims Cook Sr. Peace Park, which honors 300 years of Georgia peacemakers whose leadership has changed the world.
 “Sculptures can offer healing,” Johnson told the Illinois State University alumni newsletter last October. “They can offer inspiration, and they can be educational. I think what it’s going to capture is (Lewis’) philosophy of civil rights; that if you believe all men are created equal, then they should be treated equally.”
 Congressman Lewis did not live long enough to see the unveiling of his statue in Atlanta. However, upon seeing images of Johnson’s progress on it, he told Cook, “You know, Rodney, when I’m looking at this sculpture, I feel like I’m looking in the mirror.
 The 7-foot, 800-pound statue will leave Charleston to be displayed at Congressman Clyburn’s alma mater, S.C. State University, in Orangeburg for a week before it continues its journey on to Washington. In honor of this grand gesture, it will be accompanied by and mounted on a 1,300-pound stone plinth created by students at the American College of the Building Arts.