Alveda King: Obama Has Set Race Relations Back by Decades
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s niece slams former president over John Lewis eulogy
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Dr. Alveda King, the niece of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., has slammed former President Barack Obama for setting race relations back by decades during his "eulogy" at John Lewis’s funeral on Thursday.
Speaking to Fox News’s “Fox & Friends” on Friday, Dr. King stated that the left will "grab at any opportunity" to twist an occasion like the funeral of civil rights icon John Lewis into "a political moment."
King said that she should have expected Obama to "grab at" the chance.
"I have chosen not to politicize the death of Congressman Lewis, but to remember him as a peaceful, nonviolent warrior and encourage everyone to resolve our conflicts peacefully," she remarked.
She described Obama's eulogy as being more like a stump speech.
King said the move by the former president took America back to the segregated '60s.
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Talking about Obama's "wordplay" at the funeral, King said:
"Well, I guess we should have expected that the left, including President Obama, would take that occasion for a political moment."
"They’ll grab at any opportunity, that’s to be understood."
"Obama, with wordplay, took us back to 1960s, and that was a time when segregation was still on the books, segregation was still legal, and those in power, some of them, were trying to enforce that and keep that," she said.
WATCH:
While Obama avoided specifically using Donald Trump’s name, there was no mistaking his criticism of the president.
The former president used the occasion to push the divisive myth of voter suppression.
Obama said: "Even as we sit here, there are those in power who are doing their darnedest to discourage people from voting by closing polling locations, by 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."
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King also rejected Obama's claims of voter suppression.
"President Trump is not trying to suppress the vote," she said.
"As a matter of fact, you can see in my community, I’m telling everybody, 'Make sure you vote, register to vote. Pastors and leaders, encourage your people to vote.'
"We do want people to vote safely and we need the voting process to be fair," she said.
Obama's eulogy, King said, was nothing more than political grandstanding.
