Today, on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, US Vice President Kamala Harris will honor the civil-rights icon in South Carolina, an early-voting state, and use his legacy to persuade Black voters to vote for Democrats in the 2024 election.

Harris is the main speaker at an annual event organized by the NAACP, the oldest civil rights group in the nation, which features a prayer service and a march to the South Carolina House of Representatives in Columbia. There, Harris will emphasize one of the key election messages of the Democrats – President Joe Biden and his party will safeguard the rights of all Americans.

“She’ll address the full-scale attack on basic liberties that is happening across the nation,” including reproductive rights, said someone who knows about the speech Harris intends to give.

Biden will also celebrate the holiday by joining a “service event” in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, a state that his staff considers crucial for winning in November. Republicans, led by former President Donald Trump, are finishing their Iowa campaigns on the day of their first primary contest.

According to the show’s producers, Biden will have a syndicated radio show interview with Reverend Al Sharpton, a Black civil rights advocate, on SiriusXM in the afternoon.

Harris, the first Black vice president and the top-ranking Black and Asian official in the country, is in charge of reaching out to people of color and younger voters, groups that are less supportive of Biden.

These voters, who have been the most loyal to the Democratic Party, are uncertain over economic worries and policy failures in Washington’s split government. Following other recent polls, an Economist/YouGov survey this week showed that only 67 per cent of Black US adults liked Biden.

Before US House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, the chamber’s leading Democrat, and Representative James Clyburn, a key Biden ally in 2020, spoke at Zion Baptist Church in Columbia, South Carolina, a crowd of hundreds gathered at the historic Black church that dates back to the 1800s.

The congregation joined in singing “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” also known as the “Black National Anthem,” as a Hammond organ filled the sanctuary with music.

South Carolina, where the first shots of the US Civil War were fired in 1861, was once a major global hub for the slave trade. After the war, Jim Crow laws enforced racial segregation and discrimination in the state’s schools and public places, and denied Black people the right to vote and hold office.

The non-violent resistance led by King, the NAACP and others challenged and eventually dismantled the Jim Crow system.

However, economic inequality is still a stark reality, as it is across the US. Sixty years after the federal government began to end legal segregation in South Carolina, nearly a quarter of the state’s Black residents are poor, compared to one in ten white residents.

How Republican candidates would observe the MLK holiday during the Iowa caucuses, which start tonight, was unclear. Neither the Trump campaign nor the Republican National Committee (RNC) answered requests for comment; a RNC official said last year that the coincidence of the caucus and the holiday was a mistake.

Biden’s South Carolina win

Biden persuaded the Democratic National Committee to make South Carolina the first state in the party’s nominating process this year, giving him an advantage in a state where more than half of Democrats are Black and eliminating any serious primary competition.

The Democrats have their primary here on February 3, followed by the Republicans on February 24.

Biden’s victory in the state’s 2020 Democratic race saved his struggling campaign, convincing his opponents that he had unmatched appeal among the Black voters who overwhelmingly support the party in national elections, more than any other racial group.

Black people make up more than a quarter of the state’s population, twice the national proportion.

Now, Biden wants a decisive win here against long-shot challengers to silence doubts about his re-election bid, which has been hampered by voter worries about the economy, the direction of the country and his age, 81. Trump is 77.

Lachanda Reeves Canty, 48, of Columbia, said she is concerned about Biden’s age not because of his competence but because of his perspective as an older man on the issues facing younger people.

“The Democratic Party needs to do something to energize the younger voters,” Reeves Canty said. She voted for Biden in 2020 and said she is inclined to do so again.