In the blur of breaking news, one of President Joe Biden’s first speeches of the 2024 campaign was given in South Carolina and has already been mostly forgotten in the ongoing coverage of the state’s democratic primary on Feb. 3, 2024.

We should pay it more attention.

The site of the speech on Jan. 8, 2024, was Charleston, South Carolina’s Mother Emanuel AME Church, where, on a summer evening in 2015, an avowed white supremacist murdered nine Black worshipers, including Rev. Clementa Pinckney, the church’s pastor and a state representative. At Pinckney’s funeral, then-President Barack Obama sang a heart-felt version of the Christian hymn Amazing Grace.

From the pulpit, Biden sounded like a preacher.

“The word of God was pierced by bullets in hate and rage, propelled by not just gunpowder but by a poison,” Biden said. “A poison that’s for too long haunted this nation. What is that poison? White supremacy. … Throughout our history, it’s ripped this nation apart.”

As a historian who studies democracy in the American South, I am doing research for a book on free speech, lying and fascism in America during the 1920s and 1930s. What I have learned is that Biden’s Mother Emanuel speech should rank with some of the most important speeches in our history.

In 1820, 44 years after the nation’s birth, U.S. Sen. William Smith of South Carolina was the........

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