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.
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.