(AFP) – Joe Biden traveled to South Carolina on Sunday, his last full day as US president, where he urged Americans to “keep the faith in a better day to come” as he marked the national holiday honoring civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr. A scant day before turning the White House over to Donald Trump, Biden attended services at Royal Missionary Baptist Church, a historically Black church in North Charleston.
Promising that he is “not going anywhere,” Biden told the congregants that America “must stay engaged, we must always keep the faith in a better day to come.” He also spoke about the continued fight to make King’s dream of a color-blind nation “a reality.” Racial progress has never moved in a smooth arc in the United States, and some have described the election of Trump — who in 2015 insisted that Barack Obama was not an American — as a step backward. But Biden told the congregants that “every time I spend time in a Black church I think of one thing: the word ‘hope.'”
Monday is a US national holiday honoring King, the Nobel Peace Prize winner who advocated for non-violent resistance in the fight for equal rights for Black Americans. He was assassinated in 1968.
– ‘What this country needed’ –
South Carolina was pivotal in Biden’s path to securing the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination in 2020 — which paved the way for his defeat that year of then-incumbent Donald Trump — and Biden on Sunday thanked South Carolina Representative Jim Clyburn for his key endorsement that year. “I would not be standing — that’s not hyperbole — here at this pulpit were it not for Jim Clyburn,” the president said.
Clyburn, who is Black, later choked up when returning the favor. “Joe Biden has been what this country needed,” he said. “People don’t always appreciate it.” Biden won a mostly favorable but slightly mixed reception during his South Carolina visit on Sunday. While crowds waved at his passing motorcade and people held signs saying “Thank You Joe,” one small group chanted “Biden is a war criminal,” blaming him for the high death toll in the fighting in Gaza.
He also spoke briefly about the landmark ceasefire agreement for Gaza that took force earlier Sunday, saying, “The road to this deal has not been easy at all.” In brief remarks Sunday about the Mideast, Biden told reporters that the incipient Gaza ceasefire offered hope, but that its continuing success “will depend on the next administration.” He added that Israel’s crushing attacks on militants in southern Lebanon meant that that country now faced “an opportunity for a future free from the grip of Hezbollah.”
Charleston is home to the historic Mother Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, where a white shooter killed nine Black worshippers in 2015. While Biden, just before Christmas, commuted the death penalties of 37 people in federal prisons, he made two exceptions: those of Djokhar Tsarnaev, involved in the 2013 bombing of the Boston Marathon, and Dylann Roof, the man behind the Emanuel AME shooting.
Early Sunday, the White House announced that, in one of his final official acts, Biden had pardoned Marcus Garvey, a Jamaican-born writer and orator seen by some as a prophet who advocated for a return to Africa. Garvey had been convicted of mail fraud and sentenced to prison, but the sentence was commuted in 1927 by President Calvin Coolidge. Biden’s pardon expunges Garvey’s conviction from the record.
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