Joe Biden: Martin Luther King’s dream still hasn’t come true

From the platform of the Martin Luther King Church in Atlanta, Joe Biden today acknowledged that his dream of equality and justice has not yet come true and appealed once again to continue the fight for the “soul” of America.

“I’ve spoken in front of parliaments and kings and queens and leaders of the whole world, but here I’m stressed,” said the US president, the first sitting US president to take the floor during the service at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta. Georgia, where Martin Luther King, who would have turned 94 today, worked.

Joe Biden referred to the iconic speech of the man who became a symbol of the fight for individual rights and the end of racial discrimination with the historic phrase “I have a dream”. He was assassinated in 1968 in Memphis.

“This remains the mission of our time, to make that dream a reality, because it has not been realized,” Joe Biden said.

Recalling that he has placed a bust of Martin Luther King in the Oval Office, Joe Biden said, repeating a well-known phrase of his: “The battle for the soul of America is eternal”, it is a “permanent struggle” to defend “this sacred conviction that we are created equal and in the image of God”.

“There is still a lot of work to be done on economic justice, on individual rights, on the right to vote,” the US president admitted.

Joe Biden was invited to Atlanta by Raphael Warnock, a key pastor of the church, but also a Democratic senator who defeated the candidate supported by Donald Trump last November in the vote.

Welcoming his guest after a gospel song, Raphael Warnock joked that for a devout Catholic like Biden, the Baptist service would no doubt seem “kind of cheesy.”

The service closed with the choir singing the iconic anthem of the civil rights movement, “We Shall Overcome.”