President Joe Biden promised to deliver more wins for the black community if given a second term in a Friday speech before a group founded by the Rev. Al Sharpton.
“I see an America where, with your help, I sign the Freedom to Vote Act, the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, into law,” he said to the National Action Network conference. “Where I sign the George Floyd Justice and Policing Act, where we make Roe v. Wade the law of the land again. We can do that.”
Biden was introduced by Sharpton, who mentioned that Biden had spoken at the NAN conference while running for president in 2008 and took a veiled shot at presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump.
“There are those that want our votes, that want to take us for granted and show us some gold sneakers and other foolishness,” Sharpton said. “We want to know about concrete things and what have you done for me lately.”
Biden is locked in a dead heat with Trump ahead of the 2024 general election in November, and polling indicates that his popularity among black and Latino voters has slipped since entering office in 2021.
After the introduction for his virtual remarks, Biden called NAN the nation’s most important civil rights organization and bragged that he is leading the most diverse presidential administration in history.
The president ticked off a list of accomplishments that he said benefited black voters, including student debt forgiveness, nominating Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court, making lynching a federal hate crime, and decriminalizing marijuana possession.
“We’ve launched a major effort to root out bias in home appraisal process,” Biden said. “Homes in black communities are no longer undervalued compared to the same home in a white community. Thus far, we’ve eliminated that gap by 40%, and we’re going to continue until it’s even.”
Black wealth overall has risen 60%, the president said, before warning of the consequences of a Trump return.
“They want to turn back the clock — voter suppression, election suppression, ripping away reproductive freedom, gutting affirmative action, and attacking diversity across American life,” he said. “Banning books — this is 2024 — banning books, attempting to erase history, embracing political violence like what happened on Jan. 6.”
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Biden and Sharpton are not aligned on everything, however. The Biden administration and the National Action Network are on opposite sides of a debate over whether to ban menthol cigarettes, which Biden’s Food and Drug Administration is proposing but Sharpton says could lead to dangerous interactions with police. Neither of them mentioned the issue on Friday.
Trump is courting black voters as well, and some polls indicate he is making progress toward that goal. A Wall Street Journal poll released this week found that support for Trump among black men had doubled since 2020.
