ATLANTA (AP) – President Joe Biden made a historic pilgrimage Sunday to the “church of American freedom” to mark Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday. way and we need to pay attention.
As the first sitting president to deliver a Sunday morning sermon at King’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, Biden mentioned the question King himself asked the nation.
“He said, ‘Where do we go from here?'” Biden said from the podium. “Well, my message to this nation today, we move forward, we move forward together, when we choose democracy over autocracy, a society we love over chaos, when we choose people who believe and dream, be people who do, fearless, always . keep the faith.”
In a divided country just two years removed from a violent insurgency, Biden told congregants, elected officials and officials that “the battle for the soul of this nation is ongoing. It’s an ongoing struggle … between hope and feeling fear, kindness and cruelty, justice and injustice.
He said to those who “traffic racism, extremism, insurgency” and said that the struggle to preserve democracy is carried out in courts and ballot boxes, protests and other means. “At our best, America promises to win. … But I don’t need to tell you that we are not always the best. We make mistakes. We fail and fall.”
The stop at Ebenezer comes at a difficult moment for Biden after Attorney General Merrick Garland on Thursday announced the appointment of a special counsel to investigate how the president handled classified documents after he left the vice presidency in 2017. The White House announced the addition of secrets. notes were found at Biden’s home near Wilmington, Delaware.
In introducing Biden, the church’s senior pastor, Democratic Senator Raphael Warnock noted that the president is a “devout Catholic” who “this Baptist service might be a little rambunctious and animated. But I saw him there clapping his hands.”
King, “the greatest American prophet of the 20th century,” as Warnock puts it, served as pastor from 1960 until his assassination in 1968.
Warnock, like many of the battleground state Democrats who won re-election in 2022, has kept his distance throughout the campaign from Biden as the president’s approval rating lags and inflation rates rise.
But with the election behind him and six years to go, Warnock has completed Biden’s service. Nearby, he asked Biden to come to the front of the church and ask the Ebenezer congregation to pray for the president while he listed some of Biden’s legislative accomplishments.
“This, my friends, is God’s work,” Warnock said, adding that Biden “had nothing to do with it.”
As Biden begins to turn his attention to his 2024 re-election effort, Georgia will get a lot of attention.
In 2020, Biden managed to win Georgia and also compete in Michigan and Pennsylvania, where the Black vote makes up a disproportionate share of the Democratic electorate. Turning the state’s black voters around will be crucial to Biden’s 2024 hopes.
The White House has tried to promote Biden’s agenda in minority communities. The White House has cited efforts to encourage states to apply equity for public works projects as it siphons money from the administration’s $1 trillion infrastructure bill. The government also acted to end the disparity in sentencing between cocaine and powder cocaine offences, ending a policy widely seen as racist.
The administration also highlighted Biden’s work for various federal courts, including the appointment of Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson as the first black woman to serve on the Supreme Court and the confirmation of 11 black female judges to the federal appeals court – more than those installed on that court. powerful court in all previous presidents combined.
Biden’s failure to win measures that would strengthen voting rights protections, a central campaign promise, was one of the biggest disappointments of his first two years in office. This task is even steeper now that Republicans control the House.
In his speech, the president said that for all the progress the United States has made, the country has now reached a critical point in its history. He argues that democracy can go backwards, noting the collapse of democratic institutional structures in places such as Brazil.
“Progress is not easy, but it is always possible and everything gets better on the journey to a more perfect union,” he said. “But at this inflection point, we know there’s a lot of work to be done on civil rights, economic justice, voting rights, protecting our democracy. And I remember our job is to redeem America’s soul.
This time, he said, “is the time to vote. … Are we the people who are going to choose democracy over autocracy? We couldn’t ask that question 15 years ago because everyone thought democracy was over. … But it’s not. Americans, he said, “have to vote community instead of chaos. … This is the important question of our time and the reason why I am your president. I believe the life and legacy of Dr. King shows the way and we need to pay attention.
King, who was born on January 15, 1929, died at the age of 39. He helped drive the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Members of the King family attended the service, including his 95-year-old sister, Christine King Farris.
“I’ve spoken before parliament, kings, queens, world leaders … but this is scary,” Biden said as he opened his sermon.
The president plans to be in Washington Monday to speak at the National Action Network’s annual breakfast on the King’s holiday.
Associated Press writer Bill Barrow in Atlanta contributed to this report.
This story has been updated to reflect that Christine King Ferris is the sister of Martin Luther King Jr