- Former Vice President Joe Biden on Sunday made an unannounced visit to a site in Wilmington, Delaware where protests against police brutality and racism took place the night before.
- Leaving his home for the second time in a week, Biden recognized the death of George Floyd, a black man who was killed in Minneapolis police custody last week.
- "The original sin of the country still stains our nation today," Biden said in a video released Friday. "We need justice for George Floyd."
- Meanwhile, President Donald Trump repeatedly attacked protesters and threatened violence against them on Twitter.
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Former Vice President Joe Biden on Sunday made an unannounced visit to a site in Wilmington, Delaware where protests against police brutality and racism took place the night before.
Leaving his home for the second time in a week, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee recognized the death of George Floyd, a black man who was killed in Minneapolis police custody last week. His campaign posted a photo of Biden kneeling on the ground facing a black man also kneeling with his young son.
Biden has attempted to strike a unifying tone in his public statements as demonstrations continued in at least 75 US cities over the weekend.
We are a nation in pain right now, but we must not allow this pain to destroy us.
— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) May 31, 2020
As President, I will help lead this conversation — and more importantly, I will listen, just as I did today visiting the site of last night's protests in Wilmington. pic.twitter.com/0h2ApbKT0C
In a five-minute video released on Friday, Biden urged the country to come together and address the "national crisis" of police brutality against black people.
"The original sin of the country still stains our nation today," he said. "We need justice for George Floyd."
"We are a country with an open wound. None of us can turn away. None of us can be silent," Biden wrote in an accompanying tweet. "None of us any longer can hear those words — 'I can't breathe' — and do nothing. We must commit, as a nation, to pursue justice with every ounce of our being."
The Biden campaign announced in a Sunday email to reporters that the candidate will meet with community leaders in Wilmington on Monday morning and will hold a virtual roundtable with mayors afterwards.
Biden's response to Floyd's death and the ensuing protests has been markedly different than the president's. Over the past few days, Trump tweeted out a slew of attacks on the protesters, including one message quoting a white police officer who sparked a race riot in the 1960s.
"When the looting starts, the shooting starts," Trump declared in a message that was later flagged by Twitter for violating the platform's policy against content that "glorifies violence."
In a series of tweets on Saturday, Trump warned that the Secret Service was "just waiting for action," and would use "vicious dogs" and "ominous weapons" against protesters who breached the White House security boundary outside his residence.
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