Joe Biden is traveling to South Carolina today, his last full day as US president, where he will mark a national holiday honoring civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr.
Biden will visit the Royal Missionary Baptist Church in Charleston, where he will attend services and speak about “continuing the fight to make Dr. King’s dream a reality,” a White House official said.
He will also attend an event at the city’s International African American Museum.
Monday is a public holiday in the United States in honor of King, a Nobel Peace Prize winner who advocated nonviolent resistance in the fight for equal rights for black Americans. He was killed in 1968.
Monday is also the day Donald Trump will be sworn in to succeed Biden as president.
The White House said Biden’s “last official trip as president … continues his long relationship with the state of South Carolina.”
The state was key to Biden’s path to securing the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination.
After showing poor results in initial polls for the nomination, Biden won a landslide victory in the South Carolina primary, confirmation that he retains significant support among black voters.
Charleston is also home to the historic Mother Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, where a white gunman killed nine black worshipers in 2015 out of racial hatred.
Biden attended the funeral of Emanuel AME pastor Clement Pinckney after the mass shooting by a white gunman who wrote a racist manifesto before the killings.
Addressing Emanuel AME in 2024, Biden said he would not have been elected president without the support of the congregation and “the black community of South Carolina.”
(Vijesti.ba/HINA)
