Biden Decries 'Domestic Terrorism of White Supremacy

(Bloomberg) -- Joe Biden will draw a direct line between the violence of groups like the Ku Klux Klan and recent mass shootings when he delivers a major speech on race and domestic terrorism in Birmingham, Alabama on Sunday.The former vice president will speak at the 56th anniversary of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing, when four young black girls were killed and more than a dozen others were injured after members of a local KKK chapter bombed the church in 1963.'The domestic terrorism of white supremacy has been the antagonist of our highest ideals from before our founding,' Biden will say, according to excerpts released from the campaign.'The same poisonous ideology that lit the fuse at 16th Street pulled the trigger in Mother Emanuel, unleashed the anti-Semitic massacre in Pittsburgh and Poway, and saw a white supremacist gun down innocent Latino immigrants in an El Paso parking lot with military-grade weapons declaring it would stop a quote 'Hispanic invasion of Texas,'' Biden will say. Mother Emanuel is a name given to the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, scene of a mass shooting by a white supremacist in 2015 that killed nine people. Crucial ConstituencyBiden, the frontrunner for the 2020 Democratic nomination for president, is highly popular among African American voters, a crucial constituency in the Democratic Party. Biden is looking to lock down his advantage in South Carolina, the fourth state in the 2020 primary calendar, where more than 60% of the Democratic primary voters are black.Biden has also faced criticism for his record on race, though. He was the architect of the 1994 crime bill that critics say resulted in the mass incarceration of people of color,. One of his rivals, California Senator Kamala Harris, attacked him in the first Democratic candidates' debate for his past positions on school busing and integration. Obama's LegacyBiden also came under fire after the third Democratic debate on Thursday for his answer on the legacy of slavery.'We bring social workers into homes of parents to help them deal with how to raise their children,' he said. 'It's not that they don't want to help, they don't want -- they don't know quite what to do.'Some said the answer was racist, and that Biden had insinuated that black parents were unable to raise their own children. His campaign rejected that characterization, saying the former vice president was talking about his proposal to invest resources to underserved schools.Biden has also rebutted critics of his record on race by pointing to his service as vice president to the nation's first black president. He's closely hewed to former President Barack Obama's legacy throughout the campaign, and will likely invoke Obama multiple times on Sunday.To contact the reporter on this story: Tyler Pager in Washington at tpager1@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: Wendy Benjaminson at wbenjaminson@bloomberg.net, Ros KrasnyFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com2019 Bloomberg L.P.
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