(RepublicanPress.org) – President Joe Biden appears to have a continuing problem with non-white voters. In November 2023, The New York Times reported that surveys showed 20% of black voters supported Donald Trump, an “unprecedented” issue for a Democrat in the post-Civil Rights Act era. Six months later, a New York Times/Siena poll showed African-American support for the former president rising to 23%. The president recently played the race card as part of an apparent effort to appeal to black voters.
On May 19, Biden delivered the commencement speech at Morehouse College, a historically black men’s liberal arts school in Atlanta and the alma mater of slain civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King. The president weighed heavily on the school’s legacy and attempted to appeal to the graduating seniors and family members by focusing a significant portion of his speech on a black audience.
The president leaned into the university’s foundation 157 years ago as a place “to help formerly enslaved men enter the ministry.” He also invoked memories of Dr. King and his assassination during Biden’s final year of law school. Biden also noted that the graduating class started their four-year tenure at Morehouse in the wake of George Floyd’s death at the hands of white police officers. Continuing, he discussed “black men […] being killed on the street” and the “trail of broken promises […] leaving black communities behind.”
The president claimed that black men “have to be 10 times better” than others “to get a fair shot” and rhetorically asked what it means “to be a black man who loves his country, even if it doesn’t love him back in equal measure.”
Toward the middle of his address, Biden vowed to “root out systemic racism” and “call out the poison of white supremacy.”
Biden also devoted a considerable amount of his speech to his record on African-American issues, turning the commencement address into more of a campaign speech than one recognizing the graduating students’ accomplishments.
The president concluded his remarks by quoting a passage from the book of James, chapter 5, verse 16.
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