Forty-nine years and three days after Bloody Sunday on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, Freedom Park Conservancy hosted a Walk and Talk to the Bridge sculpture created by Thornton Dial in honor of John Lewis. Ruth Wall and noted art scholar Susan Crawley, both Inman Park neighbors, shared stories and knowledge about John Lewis, Thornton Dial, the Bridge sculpture, and how the sculpture came to be in Freedom Park near the intersection of John Lewis Freedom Parkway and Ponce de Leon Ave.
If you visit the sculpture, you can see how the bridge connects the rural south to an urban setting (and the sculpture is sited so the bridge points toward downtown Atlanta), which mirrors John Lewis’s life path from a sharecropper farm in rural Pike County, Alabama to Atlanta, GA and Washington DC. The bridge also symbolizes the journey for voters’ rights, honoring the bloody attempt to march across the bridge on March 7, 1965, and the later successful march on March 21, 1965, when the National Guard protected the marchers. You can see the image of John Lewis striding across the apex of the bridge.
The Freedom Park neighborhood has long been a space of energetic and passionate citizens working to make their community better. Freedom Park provides expansive green, open space in intown Atlanta and has numerous paths to connect the surrounding neighborhoods. As a City of Atlanta designated art park, it is home to permanent and temporary art. Take a stroll, stop by, and visit the fabulous bridge sculpture.
