Editor’s note: The following article is an op-ed, and the views expressed are the author’s own. Read more opinions on theGrio.
On his last full day in office, President Joe Biden spoke at a South Carolina Black church about his vision for a just society one day before the federal holiday honoring the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
“I first got involved in public life because of the Civil Rights Movement,” Biden said at the Royal Missionary Baptist Church in Charleston. “I had two political heroes growing up, Dr. King and Bobby Kennedy,” the former U.S. attorney general and senator, who, like Dr. King, was tragically assassinated in 1968.
Biden, who was 25 when Dr. King was killed, said last April on the 56th anniversary of Dr. King’s death: “His unfinished mission inspired me to leave a prestigious law firm to become a public defender and begin a career in public service.”
After leaving the church, Biden toured the nearby International African American Museum, at the site where some 200,000 captured Africans were sold into slavery.
In another gesture of racial reconciliation, the president issued a posthumous pardon Sunday for Black nationalist leader Marcus Garvey, who was convicted of mail fraud in 1923, imprisoned for two years and then deported to Jamaica.
Dr. King was assassinated when he was just 39. I was 8, and I vividly remember crying uncontrollably when I heard the terrible news. I couldn’t understand how God could let such a great and saintly man be murdered. Black America was plunged into a state of mourning, as if a close and dearly beloved relative suddenly died.
I later read all the books, sermons and other writings Dr. King produced. And I was honored to play a significant role in the campaign to make Dr. King’s birthday a federal holiday, working with his widow, Coretta Scott King, and many others to win congressional passage for needed legislation that was signed into law by…
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