Barack Obama blasts attacks on voting rights during John Lewis’s funeral

By Zlati Meyer

Former president Barack Obama accused the current administration of curtailing voting rights during his eulogy for Democratic representative John Lewis of Georgia today.

Without naming names, he criticized his successor, President Donald Trump, by citing the closure of polling locations, the targeting of students and minorities with restrictive voter ID laws, and, with more people likely to vote by mail-in ballots due to fears of contracting COVID-19, the hindering of the U.S. Postal Service.

“There are those in power who are doing their darnedest to discourage people from voting,” Obama said, adding that they’re “attacking our voting rights with surgical precision.”

His comments caused many people attending the service at Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church to rise to their feet, clapping.

Lewis, a civil rights icon, participated in the famous 1965 march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, where he was brutally beaten. The violent images broadcast to American homes prompted the passage of the Voting Rights Act, which abolished literacy tests and other impediments designed to prevent Black Americans from voting.

Earlier today, Trump suggested in a tweet that the upcoming presidential election should be delayed, although he has no legal authority to do so.

You can watch Obama’s comments on voting rights in the video embedded below:

 

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