(Washington) On the eve of leaving the White House, President Joe Biden is expected Sunday in the historic city of Charleston in South Carolina, marked by slavery and a racist killing in 2015 against black parishioners, including The author is sentenced to death.
Posted at 8:14 a.m.
The Democratic leader, a devout Catholic, is scheduled to visit the Protestant Royal Missionary Baptist Church to attend a religious service and speak about “continuing the fight to make the dream of [Martin Luther] King Jr. a reality,” announced a senior presidential official.
Martin Luther King Jr. Day (MLK Day), a public holiday in the United States, falls this year on Monday, the day of the inauguration of Republican Donald Trump.
For his very last official trip, the 46e American president “will continue his long-standing relationship with South Carolina”, a southeastern state which was decisive in 2020 in his race for the Democratic primaries for the White House.
The presidential official had announced earlier that Joe Biden would go to another Methodist Protestant church in Charleston: Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church.
He was in this church last January to say that he would never have been elected in 2020 without “the black community of South Carolina.”
He was also there in 2015, then vice-president of Barack Obama, for a funeral ceremony after a racist killing.
-Convinced of white supremacy over other races that he considered to be inferior, a 21-year-old American at the time, Dylann Roof, opened fire on June 17, 2015 77 times in this church, riddled with bullets nine black worshipers who had just welcomed him with open arms for a Bible study session.
This was all the more shocking in the United States and Europe because the parish is a symbolic place in the fight against slavery, bringing together the oldest black community in Charleston, since the plantation era.
Dylann Roof was sentenced to death in early 2017, which a federal appeals court upheld in August 2021, at the start of the Biden presidency.
Now aged 30, he was not at risk of being executed until now since the Biden administration imposed a moratorium on executions at the federal level in 2021.
Just before Christmas, Joe Biden commuted the death sentences of 37 convicted by the federal courts, but maintained those pronounced against Dylann Roof and Djokhar Tsarnaev, bomber of the attack against the Boston marathon on April 15, 2013.
Donald Trump also warned that he would order his administration to seek the death penalty for more defendants.
