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Grammy Award-winning singer and songwriter John Legend sat down with Soledad O’Brien to discuss his efforts to raise awareness of criminal justice reform and to restore voting rights to those with felony convictions.This conversation is part of The Matter of Fact Listening Tour: Promises of Change, which will explore solutions to the most pressing problems of the day, in education, health, housing, the environment, food insecurity, voting rights, public safety and community wealth. In the interview, Legend talked about his personal experience with his mother’s drug addiction and how it inspired him to raise awareness.“What happened to my mother specifically impacted us because she spiraled after her mother died and had a drug addiction. What I learned from that and what I learned from other interactions that my family members have had with the criminal punishment system is that so many times, we take people who are hurting and we treat them as criminals instead of as people who actually just need help,�� Legend said. Legend said one of his big focuses is to bring awareness to ending the cash bail system.“There are so many people in our local jail systems who are merely there because they haven’t been convicted of a crime, but they don’t have the $500, $1,000, $1,500 to get out of jail pre-trial, and they are stuck there,�� Legend said. “It’s used as a tool to punish poverty, used as a tool to punish powerlessness in the system. It’s not fair and it should be eradicated.�� Legend also discussed his efforts to help restore voting rights to people with felony convictions. He said that after 63% of voters in Florida voted to restore voting rights to people with felony convictions and have done their time; however, it was later determined that people who owe legal fees or fines are still considered not having fulfilled their sentence. “Whenever we make progress, there are forces of backlash that are out there. In the reconstruction era, we saw Ku Klux Klan emerge, we saw all these Jim Crow laws, that are true backlash against the progress of the Civil War and the post-civil war amendments, and we’ve seen it with the gains that were made in the civil rights era. And we’ve seen it after the election of Barack Obama. Now we’ve seen it with the election of Joe Biden, which were, in many ways, powered by the Black vote. We’ve seen backlash to that as well,�� Legend said. “That just means that we can’t take it for granted. The progress is just going to keep going. We have to continue to defend it and fight for it. Because the forces against progress are still there, and they are still going to fight, too.”Legend launched a program called “Unlocked Futures�� that supports formerly incarcerated people with re-entry into society. Watch our full interview with Legend in the video player above.