United States President Joe Biden surrendered on Tuesday 1er June, at the scene of the massacre of African Americans in Tulsa, Oklahoma, to“Help break the silence” which has long weighed on one of the worst episodes of racist violence in US history. “Because in the silence, the wounds deepen”, he insisted.
“The events we are talking about took place a hundred years ago, and yet I am the first president in a hundred years to come to Tulsa”, recalled the Democrat, saying he wanted “To break out the truth”.
The racist massacre in Tulsa has “Too long been forgotten in our history. As soon as it happened, there was an obvious effort to erase it from our memory ”, he denounced by emphasizing the presence in the public, in front of him, of three hundred-year-old survivors of this massacre: Viola Fletcher, Hughes Van Ellis and Lessie Benningfield Randle.
“Some injustices are so atrocious, so terrifying, so painful that they cannot remain buried”, continued the former vice-president of Barack Obama.
Speaking out against attacks on the suffrage of African Americans
Joe Biden used this historic speech to denounce the attacks “Absolutely unprecedented” against the right to vote of African Americans, “The most fundamental right”, through laws restricting access to the ballot box in some conservative states. “This sacred right is attacked with an intensity that I have never seen”, said the Democrat.
Since the presidential election, bills limiting access to the vote have multiplied in the States at the initiative of the Republicans. They are denounced by the Democrats as particularly striking minorities.
In Tulsa, the president therefore promised to “Beat” for an electoral law supposed to protect access to the ballot boxes to be adopted in June by Congress, as well as another text named in tribute to John Lewis, a figure in the fight for civil rights, who died in 2020. The House of representatives, controlled by the Democrats, approved in March the first bill (HR.1).
“The Senate will consider it later this month and I will fight like hell, with all the tools at my disposal, to have it passed.”, he said, while admitting that his majority in the upper house was too narrow to guarantee this vote.
