![]() And expanding early voting and making election day a national holiday.” By making sure every American is automatically registered to vote, including former inmates who’ve earned their second chance. “Once we pass the John Lewis Voting Right Act, we should keep marching to make it even better. “You want to honor John, let’s honor him by revitalizing the law that he was willing to die for,” Obama said. Obama also didn’t shy away from talking forcefully about how he believed the country should carry on Lewis’s legacy. undermining USPS /zHA5Y2rtQd- Ari Berman July 30, 2020 attacking voting rights with "surgical precision" targeting students & minorities with voter ID laws We may no longer have to guess the number of jellybeans in a jar to cast a ballot, but even as we sit here, there are those in power who are doing their darnedest to discourage people from voting by closing polling locations and targeting minorities and students with restrictive ID laws and attacking our voting rights with surgical precision, even undermining the postal service in the run-up to an election that’s going to be dependent on mail-in ballots so people don’t get sick.”Įvery single American needs to watch this clip of Obama talking about voting rights. George Wallace may be gone, but we can witness our federal government sending agents to use tear gas and batons against peaceful demonstrators. To challenge an entire infrastructure of oppression.”Īnd while Lewis “brought this country a little bit closer to our highest ideals” Obama said, the member of Congress knew the “march is not over.” He pointed out how institutions like policing and the current administration still undermine equality and perpetuate violence: “Today we witness with our own eyes police officers kneeling on the necks of Black Americans. In reflecting on the first time Lewis desegregated the buses in the South alongside his friend and comrade Bernard Lafayette, Obama remarked: “Imagine the courage of two people Malia’s age, younger than my oldest daughter. At such a young age, Lewis’s sheer determination and will placed him at the forefront of key nonviolence movements throughout the 1960s, including lunch counter sit-ins in Tennessee, Freedom Rides through the Jim Crow South, and a near-fatal march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. John Lewis on Thursday, taking aim at the Trump administration, advocating for the voting rights legislation that was Lewis’s legacy, and calling the 33-year Georgia representative a “founding father” of what will one day be a “fuller, better, fairer America.”įrom the historic pulpit at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta where Reverend Martin Luther King once preached, Obama expressed shock at the level of perseverance and purpose that Lewis displayed throughout his life. Former President Barack Obama delivered a gripping eulogy at the funeral for Rep.
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