A statue of John Lewis, the civil rights leader and congressman, was installed on Friday in front of a Georgia county courthouse in a space occupied for more than 100 years by a Confederate memorial.

The 12-foot-tall bronze statue was placed in front of the DeKalb County Courthouse in Decatur, Ga., which was part of the congressional district that Mr. Lewis represented for 17 consecutive terms.

For years, activists pushed for the Confederate memorial, a 30-foot stone obelisk that had stood in the same spot as the new statue, to be removed. In 2019, a plaque was installed that said the memorial promoted white supremacy and the obelisk was removed in 2020.

Before Mr. Lewis, a Democrat, was elected to Congress, he had risked his life for the civil rights movement. He was one of the original 13 Freedom Riders who rode buses across the South in 1961 to protest segregation on public transportation and was a founder of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which coordinated sit-ins.

He helped organize the March on Washington and helped lead hundreds of demonstrators across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., in 1965 to demand voting rights. At the march in Selma, a trooper fractured Mr. Lewis’s skull with a club after troopers attacked the nonviolent demonstrators.