• As a young comminity activist Obama helped 150,000 African Americans register
to vote.

• Obama worked as a civil rights attorney for more than a decade litigating
employment discrimination, housing discrimination, and voting rights cases.

• His record in the Illinois State Senate focused heavily on civil liberty and
rights.  He passed one of the country's first racial profiling laws and helped
reform a broken death penalty system. 

• In the U.S. Senate, Obama has been a leading advocate for protecting the
right to vote, helping to reauthorize the Voting Rights Act and leading the
opposition against discriminatory barriers to voting.

• He would expand Hate Crimes Statutes by passing the Matthew Shepherd Act, 
strengthening federal hate crime legislation, and stengthening enforcement at
the Department of Justice. 

• Obama would combat employment discrimination by working to overturn the
Supreme Court's recent ruling that curtails racial minorities' and women's
ability to challenge pay discrimination. He would also pass the ‘Fair Pay Act’
to ensure that women receive equal pay for equal work and the ‘Employment
Non-Discrimination Act’ to prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation
or gender identity or expression. 

• Obama will provide job training, substance abuse and mental health counseling
to ex-offenders, so that they are successfully re-integrated into society. He
will also create a prison-to-work incentive program to improve ex-offender
employment and job retention rates. 

• He would ban racial profiling by federal law enforcement agencies and provide
federal incentives to state and local police departments to prohibit the
practice. 

• Obama would end deceptive voting practices by signing into law his
legislation that establishes harsh penalties for those who have engaged in
voter fraud and provides voters who have been misinformed with accurate and
full information so they can vote.  

• Obama voted NO on extending the Patriot Act's wiretap provision extending the
authority of the FBI to conduct "roving wiretaps" and access business records.