President Joe Biden delivering Morehouse College commencement address

ATLANTA, Ga. (Atlanta News First) - Joe Biden will become the second sitting American president to deliver Morehouse College’s commencement address, following in the footsteps of his former boss, Barack Obama.

On Tuesday, both Morehouse and the White House announced Biden will deliver the address to the private, all-male HBCU on Sunday, May 19, at 9 a.m.

His speech will mark the president’s first visit back to the Peach State after a March campaign rally. In 2013, then-President Obama - under whom Biden served as vice president - delivered Morehouse’s commencement address for that class.

The 2024 ceremony will be Morehouse’s 140th commencement exercise.

But almost immediately after the announcement on Monday, students, faculty and alumni began expressing concern over Biden’s visit to the campus. It was over Biden’s unwillingness to call for an immediate and permanent ceasefire in the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas —resulting in the deaths of tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians.

“We learned at Morehouse the importance of speaking up against injustice, not only in Atlanta or Georgia or in America but all around the world,” said Edward Ahmed Mitchell, a civil rights attorney working with the national chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

Mitchell is a Morehouse College graduate and is Muslim.

“I can understand why the college would welcome the president of the United States to speak, but the timing is bad,” he said. “It would almost be like inviting Lyndon Johnson to come and speak at Morehouse at the height of the Vietnam War.”

“It’s a little concerning,” said Morehouse sophomore and sociology major Adian Patterson. “I don’t really want my school to be placed in complicity with what Biden is doing with Israel. But it’s also a good thing as well because it gives us that representation that the president acknowledges Morehouse as the illustrious institution that it is. It’s a double-edged sword.”

Biden’s Morehouse address is his second time delivering a commencement address to an HBCU. Last year, Biden spoke at Howard University, the alma mater of Vice President Kamala Harris.

Morehouse is also the alma mater of Georgia U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock.

“I could not be more thrilled and honored to see President Biden return to our great state,” Warnock said in a statement reported by the Associated Press. “I know the president will have a timely, poignant, forward-looking message for the men of Morehouse.”

Georgia is a key focus in the 2024 presidential election for a rematch between Biden and former President Donald Trump.

A March 2024 memo from Biden’s reelection campaign stressed Georgia as “an extremely competitive state” in November’s election.

The memo from reelection campaign chair Julie Chavez Rodriguez said Biden’s campaign “has made our earliest ever investment in paid media in Georgia and North Carolina, including a historic $25-million, 16-week TV ad campaign to reach general election voters across key battleground states last year and a six-week, $30-million spring ad buy that kicked off in March.”

Georgia, according to Rodriguez, was the closest state in the country won by Biden in 2020, and North Carolina was the closest state in the country won by Trump.

Both Biden and Trump are the respective, presumptive Democratic and GOP nominees for president, setting the stage for an historic rematch of their 2020 campaigns. They have been polling well within the margins of error for every poll thus far in the election season, making Georgia a virtual toss-up.

In 2020, Biden won Georgia by less than 12,000 votes.

Only days before his historic criminal trial began, Trump held a major, private fundraiser at Atlanta’s St. Regis Hotel.

Trump is now on trial in New York in a case brought by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg. Trump faces 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in the first degree, all of which are tied to the former president’s role in a hush-money payment to a porn star, Stormy Daniels.

Trump is also under indictment in Atlanta. He and 13 remaining co-defendants are accused of engaging in an organized crime-like scheme to overturn Georgia’s 2020 election results, an election that saw Biden become the first Democrat since 1992 to carry any deep Southern state in a presidential contest.

November’s election will be the first presidential electoral rematch since 1956. In 1952, Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower defeated Illinois Gov. Adlai Stevenson after then-President Harry Truman chose not to run for a second full term. Four years later, Democrats again nominated Stevenson for the presidency, which led to a second defeat at then-President Eisenhower’s hands.

Among Republicans, no presidential candidate has ever been nominated for three consecutive elections; Grover Cleveland, a Democrat, was elected president in 1885 and served only one term before being elected to a second term four years later (1885-1889 and 1893-1897). President Franklin Delano Roosevelt holds the record for the most nominations: four.

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