Biden denounces the use of the internet to agitate racism on the anniversary of Martin Luther King’s speech

2023-08-29 07:28:27

There is not much to commemorate, the dream continues. On August 28, 1963, an estimated 250,000 people gathered at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington to ask for work and freedom. Martin Luther King’s speech of “I have a dream” that day became the symbol of the fight for racial rights and social equality, but 60 years later “America has once again fallen into intolerance and prejudice”, organizers of the anniversary march said Saturday.

That same day, a 21-year-old white gunman with a swastika on his rifle and a racist manifesto walked into the historic black Edward Waters University, killing three people in cold blood in a Dollar General store. “He hated black people and I think everyone who wasn’t white, he made that very clear,” Sheriff TK Waters said yesterday. Joe Biden compared it to the murder of the four girls who died two weeks after Martin Luther King’s speech in a bomb attack that occurred in a Baptist church in Birmingham (Alabama).

“White supremacy is poison,” the president said. “It has been allowed to grow faster and faster in our communities, to the point that US intelligence has concluded that domestic terrorism rooted in white supremacy is the greatest terrorist threat we face on our soil.”

At that time, the president was receiving the Committee of Lawyers for Civil Rights that John F Kennedy formed in the 1960s, after imploring them to work pro bono on cases that could become benchmarks to advance the causes that the murdered reverend dreamed of for five years. later in Memphis. Kennedy would not live to see it. He was killed in Dallas three months after the speech that was his 60th birthday yesterday.

“Silence is your accomplice”

Since then, the lawyers’ organization, to which another president, Biden, pleaded again yesterday for his help, has put more than a million hours of unpaid work into advancing these causes, but racist hatred “never dies, it hides under the stones, and when someone breathes oxygen into it, it comes out roaring,” said the president. «Silence is his accomplice and we are not going to remain silent. Denying it is even worse, we will call him by his name ».

The president acknowledged that nothing can completely prevent the radicalization of certain individuals and blamed it on the “relentless exploitation of the internet to recruit and mobilize violent extremists.” The conflict that this generates with the first constitutional amendment, with which the United States has made freedom of expression sacred, is one of the main problems that he sees in that fight. Biden believes that times are once again as critical as that convulsive year of 1963 in which Kennedy was killed.

“When history is being erased, books are being censored, and diversity, which is the strength of our nation and the cornerstone of democracy, is being attacked, it is time to speak up,” he warned, in a veiled reference to what It’s happening in Florida. If that 1963 was a moment that defined America for her, this 2023 is too. “We are at a turning point in history, not just for the US but for the world,” she warned. “But being a true optimist, I’ll tell you that a tipping point is when you’re going sixty miles an hour down the highway and suddenly you make such a sharp right turn that you can never go back to the way you were before. You are facing a new destination and even if you do not know exactly what it is, you will have to adapt to it. END