NORTH CHARLESTON, S.C. >> Joe Biden spent his final full day as president Sunday in South Carolina, urging Americans to “keep the faith in a better day to come” and reflecting on the influence of both the civil rights movement and the state itself in his political trajectory.

On the eve of Monday’s inauguration of Republican President-elect Donald Trump, Biden delivered a final farewell from a state that holds special meaning after his commanding win in its 2020 Democratic primary set him up to achieve his life’s goal of winning election as president.

Biden spoke to the congregation of Royal Missionary Baptist Church about why he entered public service — Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy were political heroes, he said. And in a nod to South Carolina Democrats, he said: “I owe you big.”

The day before the federal holiday honoring King, the slain civil rights leader, Biden struck a more hopeful tone for the future of the country than his televised farewell address last Wednesday, when he warned about an “oligarchy” of the ultrawealthy taking root and a “tech-industrial complex” impeding the future of democracy.

“We know the struggle to redeeming the soul of this nation is difficult and ongoing,” Biden said Sunday. “We must hold on to hope. We must stay engaged. We must always keep the faith in a better day to come.”

Biden later toured the International African American Museum in Charleston which was built on a waterfront site where tens of thousands of enslaved Africans were brought to the U.S. from the late 1760s through 1808.

He spoke about efforts to ensure an administration “that looks like America,” pointing to people like Lloyd Austin, who was Biden’s secretary of defense and the first Black person in the job. Speaking of his nomination of Ketanji Brown Jackson as the first Black woman to the Supreme Court, he leaned toward the microphone and said: “And by the way, she’s smarter than those guys.”

“We’re proving that by remembering our history, we can make history,” Biden said.

Term’s final pardons

Biden on Sunday posthumously pardoned Black nationalist Marcus Garvey, who influenced Malcolm X and other civil rights leaders and was convicted of mail fraud in the 1920s. Also receiving pardons were a top Virginia lawmaker and advocates for immigrant rights, criminal justice reform and gun violence prevention.

Congressional leaders had pushed for Biden to pardon Garvey, with supporters arguing that Garvey’s conviction was politically motivated and an effort to silence the increasingly popular leader who spoke of racial pride. After Garvey was convicted, he was deported to Jamaica, where he was born. He died in 1940.

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. said of Garvey: “He was the first man, on a mass scale and level” to give millions of Black people “a sense of dignity and destiny.”

Among those pardoned on Sunday was Don Scott, who is the speaker of the Virginia House of Delegates in a chamber narrowly controlled by Democrats. He was convicted of a drug offense in 1994 and served eight years in prison. He was elected to the Virginia legislature in 2019, and later became the first Black speaker.

“I am deeply humbled to share that I have received a Presidential Pardon from President Joe Biden for a mistake I made in 1994 — one that changed the course of my life and taught me the true power of redemption,” Scott said in a statement.

Biden has set the presidential record for most individual pardons and commutations issued. He announced on Friday that he was commuting the sentences of almost 2,500 people convicted of nonviolent drug offenses. He also gave a broad pardon for his son Hunter, who was prosecuted for gun and tax crimes.