Warning that the “darker currents” of American history “can always rise again,” former President Barack Obama used his eulogy of civil rights icon and lawmaker John Lewis on Thursday to compare racist officials in the old segregated South to the Trump administration.
“George Wallace may be gone, but we can witness our federal government sending agents to use tear gas and batons against peaceful demonstrators,” he said to applause at the historic Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta.
Obama also made a reference to Bull Connor, the Birmingham, Alabama, official who became a symbol of institutional racism by ordering the use of fire hoses and police attack dogs against civil rights activists.
Defending the Trump administration, Attorney General William Barr told Congress on Tuesday that what “unfolds nightly” around the federal courthouse in Portland, Oregon, “cannot reasonably be called protest.”
“It is, by any objective measure, an assault on the government of the United States,” he said. “Since when is it OK to burn down a federal courthouse?”
Obama continued his attack on Trump, insinuating that measures to ensure the integrity of elections, such as requiring voter ID, amount to racist voter suppression.
“Even as we sit here, there are those in power who are doing their darndest 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,” the former president said.
Obama justified his political statements during a “a celebration of John’s life” by arguing Lewis “devoted his time on this earth fighting the very attacks on democracy, and what’s best in America, that we’re seeing circulate right now.”
“George Wallace may be gone but we can witness our federal government sending agents to use tear gas and batons against peaceful demonstrators.”
— @BarackObama pic.twitter.com/DlPkEAIoyp
— Washington Examiner (@dcexaminer) July 30, 2020
