‘We will fight,’ US VP Harris says, warning of threats to US freedom
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U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris warned Americans that their freedom is under threat as she commemorated Martin Luther King Jr. Day in early-voting South Carolina on Monday, wielding the civil-rights icon’s legacy to urge Black voters to join Democrats to win the 2024 election.
Harris headlined an annual event by the NAACP, the nation’s oldest civil rights group, which included a prayer service and a march to the South Carolina House of Representatives in Columbia. She pressed one of Democrats’ central election messages – President Joe Biden and his Democrats need voters’ help to protect Americans’ rights from Republicans.
Harris said that freedom in the country is under “profound threat,” citing the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, long lines for voting and the prevalence of gun violence. She quoted King’s late widow, Coretta Scott King, who said “Freedom is never truly won. You earn it and win it in every generation.”
Voters need to “roll up our sleeves,” she said. “We were born for a time such as this.”
“We will fight,” Harris concluded. “And when we fight we win.”
Ahead of her speech, a group of chanting protesters, some waving Palestinian flags, massed outside the venue, a sign of the dissent within the Democratic Party over Biden’s Israel policy.
Biden marked the holiday by volunteering for Philabundance, a hunger relief group in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, a state his aides regard as must-win in November, where he loaded packages with fresh fruit and milk onto a conveyer belt in a warehouse.
Republicans, including that party’s front-runner, former President Donald Trump, are wrapping up their Iowa campaigns on the day of their first nominating contest. The state is honoring King by “exercising true grassroots democracy,” said Jeff Kaufmann, the chair of the Republican Party in Iowa.
Biden, top Democrats and some Republicans have warned that Trump’s role in the Jan. 6, 2021 attacks on the U.S. Capitol and his pledge to punish his political enemies suggest he could destroy democratic norms in the country if he wins the White House again.
Trump has dismissed the accusations against him as politically motivated and accused Biden of being a threat to democracy.
Biden will do a syndicated radio show interview with Black civil rights advocate Reverend Al Sharpton on SiriusXM on Monday afternoon, according to the show’s producers.
Harris, the country’s first Black vice president and its highest-ranking Black and Asian elected official, is tasked with outreach to people of color and younger voters, groups whose support for Biden has waned.
Long the Democratic Party’s most reliable backers, these voters are wavering over economic anxiety and policy disappointments in divided-government Washington. Echoing other recent public-opinion polls, an Economist/YouGov survey this week found only 67% of Black U.S. adults had a favorable view of Biden.
