By Joseph Patrick Kelly
In the blur of breaking news, one of President Joe Biden’s first speeches of the 2024 campaign was given in South Carolina and has already been mostly forgotten in the ongoing coverage of the state’s democratic primary on Feb. 3, 2024.
We should pay it more attention.
The site of the speech on Jan. 8, 2024, was Charleston, South Carolina’s Mother Emanuel AME Church, where, on a summer evening in 2015, an avowed white supremacist murdered nine Black worshipers, including Rev. Clementa Pinckney, the church’s pastor and a state representative. At Pinckney’s funeral, then-President Barack Obama sang a heart-felt version of the Christian hymn Amazing Grace.
From the pulpit, Biden sounded like a preacher.
“The word of God was pierced by bullets in hate and rage, propelled by not just gunpowder but by a poison,” Biden said. “A poison that’s for too long haunted this nation. What is that poison? White supremacy. … Throughout our history, it’s ripped this nation apart.”
As a historian who studies democracy in the American South, I am doing research for a book on free speech, lying and fascism in America during the 1920s and 1930s. What I have learned is that Biden’s Mother Emanuel speech should rank with some of the most important speeches in our history.
The original big lie
In 1820, 44 years after the nation’s birth, U.S. Sen. William Smith of South Carolina was the first to claim in Congress that men were not created equal. Boldly rejecting the Declaration of Independence as effusive “enthusiasm,” Smith injected white supremacy into public discourse.
It spread like wildfire, and there’s little wonder. Smith, who owned several plantations and at least 71 enslaved people, was among more than 1,800 U.S. legislators who enslaved Black people.
Southern propagandists rewrote history, arguing the founders never really believed in equality. If you disagreed, vigilante thugs would beat you up or chase you into exile. They killed more than a few people who spoke up against slavery.
‘A house divided against itself cannot stand’
The Supreme Court’s infamous 1857 decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford extended Southern racist ideology into the North. Black people, the court held, are “so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect, and … the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery.”
The following year, in his campaign for the U. S. Senate, Abraham Lincoln sounded the alarm. He addressed the consequences of slavery on America’s democracy and warned that “a house divided against itself cannot stand.”
“This government cannot endure,” he said, “permanently half slave and half free. It will become all one thing, or all the other. Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it … or its advocates will push it forward till it shall become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new, North as well as South.”
Sepia Times/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
The Civil War was supposed to end slavery and the white supremacist ideology that underpinned it. The 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments, known as the Reconstruction amendments, made equality explicit in the Constitution, extending civil and political rights to newly freed African Americans.
That upended the Southern social order.
The South then invented what Biden called the “self-serving lie” of the “Lost Cause,” the rewritten version of the Civil War that claims slavery had nothing to do with the war. The white supremacist group Ku Klux Klan was the violent hammer of this “Lost Cause,” and its emergence coincided with Jim Crow laws that established racial segregation across the South and disenfranchised Black voters until the 1960s.
Democracies in peril
In his State of the Union address on Jan. 6, 1941, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt sounded a new alarm. His “Four Freedoms” speech was an updated version of Lincoln’s and further defined freedom within a democracy.
The immediate issue was whether the U.S. should help England and other European allies defend against the fascist regimes of German Nazi leader Adolf Hitler and Italian dictator Benito Mussolini.
This was no academic question of foreign policy. In helping Britain, President Roosevelt stated, the United States was fighting for the universal freedoms that all people possessed: freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from want and freedom from fear.
Biden has rung a similiar alarm. During his speech at Mother Emanuel church – and again during other campaign stops before the Feb. 3 Democratic Party primary in South Carolina – Biden acknowledged that he is not only running against the GOP front-runner Donald Trump but also against a “second lost cause” myth.
Biden called out Trump for his “big lie” about the 2020 election that Trump has repeatedly claim was “rigged” against him. He criticized those who he said are attempting to “steal history” again and spin the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection as “a peaceful protest.”
At its core, Biden warned, Trump’s campaign slogan, “Make America Great Again,” is a resurrection of southern-style white nationalism and the age-old disregard for equal rights.
“We all know who Donald Trump is,” Biden said during his speech and in his ads, calling on Americans to work to make up for centuries of racism and discrimination “The question we have to answer is who are we?”
Joseph Patrick Kelly is Professor of Literature and Director of Irish and Irish American Studies at the College of Charleston.
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Greg says
What a sham. Read the history on Biden, and you will see he was a white power guy, till he needed the black votes. Don’t believe this line of crap he is putting out. Almost every politician will tell you want you want to hear. His story will change, depending on what you want to hear.
Deborah Coffey says
Perhaps a better question is: Who do we want to be? We know what the MAGAs want to be and what they are. But, the MAGAs are not the majority of Americans. Still, they manage to gain power at legislative levels so, while this article is an excellent summation of our very racist past and current history, it will not see the light of day in our Florida classrooms because MAGAs control the state. The lies will continue into our next generation unless we vote for change at all levels of our government.
bob says
biden is destroying america day by day, reprobate
Ray W. says
Since the primary definition of reprobate is a term that is used to humorously describe a person’s character as a lovable unprincipled person, I will take the snarky comment as it was apparently intended. Therefore, Biden must not be destroying America after all. He is more of a lovable uncle who bumbles and stumbles through life. Interesting snark, though.
I am reminded of the married owners of a local motor lodge located just down the street from my childhood home in the Shores. She and her husband owned a pink Cadillac convertible. My parents were well known in the community for supporting civil rights, which created its own backlash in certain circles. When my father ran for state attorney, she and her husband used to park their Cadillac in front of the old News-Journal building just off Beach Street. With the top down, they erected a sign inside the passenger compartment: “The News-Journal supported Castro, too.” Yes, my parents were declared to be communists for openly supporting civil rights for all citizens. My father won the election. Anyone can say anything at any time. Doesn’t mean they are right or even reasonable. The only thing I really remember, and even that memory is hazy, about the Cadillac pair is that one day I saw a demolished set of parking garages at their motor lodge. The wife had gone shopping. While she was gone, her husband had painters start repainting the garages for the guests. He did not have the painters use pink paint, her desired color of choice. When the wife returned, my father told me, she saw the color of the paint, backed her car to the west side of A-1-A, and then floored the throttle, driving eastward across the street and through the brick walls of the parking garages, bringing them all down. How easy it is to destroy things. All it takes is a little hateful pride and everything can be brought down.
From the outmoded and archaic Calvinist perspective of reprobate, well then, Biden, according to Bob, is damned for eternity.
Oy vey!
Joe D says
2 quotes immediately come to mind. I’m not sure who said the first quote…but I THINK the second is from Winston Churchhill ( then Prime Minister of England during WWII).
1-“Those that fail to LEARN from the past, are doomed to REPEAT it!”
I fear this country hasn’t fully learned from the horrors of the past (Revolutionary war/Civil war/WWI and WWII)…and repeating the past MAY destroy the DEMOCRACY so many have given their LIVES to protect.
2-“The only thing that will allow EVIL to TRIUMPH, is for GOOD men to do….NOTHING.”
Our most recent Florida mid term election where only approximately 1/2 the registered voters cast a ballot, is an indication of how the second quote can be more DANGEROUS than the FIRST!
Jackson says
What other country erects statues for traitors and losers?
Pogo says
@So, again
Thank you for one of the best, and important, things I’ve read anywhere — in a long, long while.
Dennis C Rathsam says
Its about time, the folks here on Flagler Live, see the mess Biden has done to America! Ive been preaching this for 3 1/2 years now. America was safer, with no new wars, & no invaders four years ago.
Nancy N. says
Spoken like a rich white heterosexual male, because in Trump (and DeSantis) world…everyone else has a target on their back.
Dennis C Rathsam says
Why because I believe in god, and America? U bet Am a man, who was once poor! But this great country allowed me to succeed. I did it with hard work, & saving my money. Is that a crime? I cant help it if the thruth hurts. Biden is a failed president. Thats why his approval rating is 35% the lowest of any other sitting president at this point of his presidency in history. Theres no target on your back. I cant fix your insacuraties,you need to pray, to find peace. God bless you Nancy
Ray W. says
Do you now condemn our governor’s claim that, if elected president, he will “slit throats” on his first day of office? Do you condemn your fellow partisan politician who took to the radio to ask when people could begin beheading liberals? Until you do so, you are nothing more than a member of a cult, one who would be considered “pestilential” by our founding fathers.
The rest of your comment is nothing more than you talking to hear your head roar.
Sherry says
At Last! Thank you Ray W.!!! Sometimes a spade really is only a spade.
Sherry says
@dennis. . . I know I’ve suggested changing the channel away from FOX, and counseling/anger management before. Enrollment in adult education English grammar and spelling classes would also be of benefit to you.