Its author, a white supremacist, was sentenced to death.
The Democratic president, a devout Catholic, went to the Protestant Royal Missionary Baptist Church to attend a religious service.
“Every time I spend time in a black church, I think of one thing: the word ‘hope,’” said the politician at the twilight of his career, citing his two role models for more than half a year. century: the icon Martin Luther King Jr. and the emblematic senator Bobby Kennedy, also assassinated in 1968.
A speech full of hope
“My father used to say that the greatest sin is the abuse of power,” continued Joe Biden, without ever naming Donald Trump.
But “faith teaches us that the America of our dreams is always closer than we think,” pleaded this 82-year-old believer, in a speech much more optimistic than his very dark farewell to the Nation on Wednesday, when he denounced an “oligarchy which is taking shape in America”.
“Let’s keep the faith for better days!”, he concluded to the applause of the faithful standing in the church.
South Carolina and its African-American community were decisive for Joe Biden.
Thanks to parliamentarian Jim Clyburn, this southeastern state fell into Mr. Biden’s hands during the 2020 Democratic primaries for the race for the White House.
“Joe Biden was what the country needed,” greeted Mr. Clyburn, deploring that his “good friend” is “not always appreciated” at his true value.
-Joe Biden had initially planned to visit another Protestant church in Charleston, where he said in January 2024 that he would never have been elected president without “the black community of South Carolina.”
Not his first visit
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 inferior, a 21-year-old American at the time, Dylann Roof, opened fire on June 17, 2015 77 times in this church, peppering nine worshipers with bullets. black people who had just welcomed him with open arms for a Bible study session.
This was all the more shocking in the United States as the parish is a symbolic place in the fight against slavery, bringing together the oldest black community in Charleston.
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 Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, bomber of the attack against the Boston marathon in 2013.
And, on Sunday, he granted his last presidential pardons and commutations: he posthumously pardoned the Jamaican Marcus Garvey, black activist and central figure of the Rastafari movement. Died in 1940, he was a precursor of Pan-Africanism by defending a return of descendants of black slaves to Africa.
