Biden ran for president blasting the Charlottesville march and pledging to «restore the soul of America.» The racist massacre in Buffalo is a sharp challenge to that promise.
President Biden plans to visit Buffalo on Tuesday to deliver a speech and meet with grieving families after Saturday’s racist massacre, a tragedy that struck during the presidency of a man who has long stressed the urgency of racial justice in America but has struggled to enact the measures that civil rights leaders say are needed to achieve it. Biden, in his own telling, decided to run for the White House specifically because of the hate and bile he saw surrounding a 2017 “Unite the Right” march of white supremacists in Charlottesville. He wrote an essay about it, spoke about it and used it as the north star of his presidential campaign. “This is not who we are,” he said, over and over again. Now, more than a year into his presidency, a White man has slaughtered 10 people in an openly racist act in a Black neighborhood, raising perhaps the biggest challenge yet to Biden’s assertion that he can “restore the soul of America.” It’s just the latest outburst of violence in recent years, prompting some activists to pose a counter-question to the claim at the center of Biden’s presidency: Is this, in fact, who we are? Inside the Buffalo massacre
Biden on Tuesday will visit the stricken city in what could amount to his opening effort to answer that question. The president plans to meet with grieving families. He will deliver remarks on the tragedy. He intends to console traumatized police officers. He may reiterate his calls for gun control. But civil rights leaders are urging Biden — a man who served with the first Black president, chose the first Black vice president and arguably owes his position to Black voters — to go beyond such actions and deliver a sweeping call for racial justice.
“He has not dramatized it in a way that we need,” said Al Sharpton, who leads the National Action Network and is in frequent communication with the White House. “He needs to convene a cross-section of leaders from different communities that have been under attack, to show that his administration is going to be aggressive, not just empathetic.”
More than one Black leader cited as a model President Barack Obama’s trip to Charleston, S.
