WASHINGTON: US President Joe Biden is a black voter starting Thursday with several civil rights university icons, Martin Luther King, Jr.
The veteran Democrat is counting on African-American voters to help him beat Donald Trump in 2020, but some polls show voters abandoning him ahead of the November showdown with Republicans.
On Thursday, Biden, 81, met with key figures and relatives of plaintiffs in the case in the Oval Office of the US Supreme Court to mark the 70th anniversary of the landmark decision to end segregation in schools.
This group included Sheryl Brown Henderson, daughter of Oliver Brown, in the 1954 case Brown v. The Board of Education proved a turning point in the US civil rights movement.
“In the ’40s and ’50s … the people you see here knew they were taking a risk when they came in to be a part of this,” Biden said after the meeting.
On Friday, Biden visited the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History and Culture in Washington to speak to mark the anniversary of the Brown decision.
Later that day, Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris – the first black, South Asian and female vice president in US history – will meet with the leaders of nine black women and fraternal organizations.
White House spokeswoman Carine-Pierre Biden “honors the legacy of those who paved the way for the progress and rights won for black Americans.”
“Also, it will reveal a vision of how we should build this freedom,” added Anne-Pierre, who is the first black person in the role.
Later on Sunday, Biden will address graduates of the historically black Morehouse College in Atlanta. King was a former student and prominent civil rights leader.
Biden has a bust of King in the Oval Office as a symbol of his support for racial equality, which often contrasts with what he calls irrelevant and anti-immigrant language from his rival, Trump.
Morehouse’s visit was politically sensitive because of widespread protests on campuses and graduations across the United States against Biden’s support for Israel’s war on Gaza.
According to NBC News, senior White House officials met with students and faculty at Morehouse to discuss objections to Biden’s commencement address.
“There are many legitimate issues. I think people have the right to protest, to act peacefully. I respect that,” he said.
On Thursday, the Biden administration said $16 billion has been invested in black colleges and universities (HBCUs) since Biden took office.
“President Biden and I are committed to using every effort we have to support HBCUs and the students and communities they serve,” Harris, a Howard University HBCU graduate, said in a statement.
In addition to trailing Trump in several key battlegrounds, the New York Times/Siena poll shows Biden’s appeal to black voters as well as African Americans.
Trump won more than 20 percent of black voters in the poll, the highest level of black support for a Republican presidential candidate since the 1964 Civil Rights Act, according to the New York Times.
Several other polls show Biden trailing among black voters.
But Derrick Johnson, president of the nation’s main civil rights organization, the NAACP, who attended Thursday’s White House meeting, said there was an “erosion” of support among black voters and said the polls were flawed in recent elections.
According to the Pew Research Center, black voters in 2020 are very loyal to the Democratic Party, with 92 percent voting for Biden and only eight percent for Trump.
“Trump has hurt black people every chance he gets to be president,” Biden said in an interview with Atlanta radio. “Remember who Trump is.”
