US President Joe Biden spent his final full day as president on Sunday in South Carolina, urging Americans to “keep the faith in a better day to come” and reflecting on the influence of both the civil rights movement and the state itself in his political trajectory.
On the eve of the inauguration of US president-elect Donald Trump, Biden delivered a final farewell from a state that holds special meaning after his commanding win in its 2020 Democratic primary set him up to achieve his life’s goal of winning election as president.
Biden spoke to the congregation of Royal Missionary Baptist Church about why he entered public service — Martin Luther King Jr and Robert F. Kennedy were political heroes, he said.
Photo: AFP
And in a nod to South Carolina Democrats, he said: “I owe you big.”
The day before the federal holiday honoring King, the slain civil rights leader, Biden struck a more hopeful tone for the future of the country than his televised farewell address on Wednesday last week, when he warned about an “oligarchy” of the ultrawealthy taking root and a “tech-industrial complex” impeding the future of democracy.
“We know the struggle to redeeming the soul of this nation is difficult and ongoing,” Biden said on Sunday. “We must hold on to hope. We must stay engaged. We must always keep the faith in a better day to come.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” he said, as the congregation applauded.
Biden later toured the International African American Museum in Charleston, which was built on a waterfront site where tens of thousands of enslaved Africans were brought to the US from the late 1760s through 1808.
He spoke about efforts to ensure an administration “that looks like America,” pointing to people such as Lloyd Austin, who was Biden’s secretary of defense and the first black person in the job.
Speaking of his nomination of Ketanji Brown Jackson as the first black woman to the Supreme Court, he leaned toward the microphone and said: “And by the way, she’s smarter than those guys.”
“We’re proving that by remembering our history, we can make history,” Biden said.
Before the church service, as hostages started to be released under a ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas that the US helped broker, Biden said: “The guns in Gaza have gone silent.”
He added that in May, he had outlined the agreement to halt the fighting.
“Now it falls on the next administration to help implement this deal. I was pleased to have our team speak as one voice in the final days,” Biden said, before urging Trump to keep supporting regional allies and using diplomacy to maintain the hard-won deal.
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