President Biden officially kicked off his 2024 campaign season this week after successfully delivering what political pundits have called “a fiery” State of the Union address to the nation on Capitol Hill on March 7. Not quite living up to the rightwing political talking point of being “Sleepy Joe,” Biden began his emphatic third address by reaching back into the annals of American history to the year directly before his birth, 1941. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was in the White House at a very pivotal point in world history. As Biden noted in his speech, Germany’s Adolph Hitler and his Nazi regime “was on the march” across Europe, swallowing up countries and decimating them, terrorizing and imprisoning dissidents in brutal and deadly concentration camps, and systematically structuring a sadistically pathological plan of serial genocide targeting gypsies, the LGBTQI+ community, political enemies, and those of Jewish descent.

This was not a plot hatched overnight in a smoky bar of disgruntled politicians. Hitler’s insanity began long before he became Chancellor in 1933. In what is called his “manifesto,” Hitler outlined his vision for Germany in “Mein Kampf,” translated in English as “My Struggle,” published in 1925. In the book Hitler made it clear that he saw a Germany free of immigrants and the mixture of races. He proposed that Jews be poisoned by gas to eliminate them from the whole of Germany. Many in political circles at that time thought Hitler to be mad, and though his rhetoric was extreme in nature, neither the German government nor its people took the soon-to-be mass murderer and World War II instigator as a threat to humanity. History reveals that indeed Hitler would become the ultimate menace to global security. Even he attempted to publicly distance himself from his book upon becoming chancellor in 1933, he continued to insist that publishing houses print more editions. When he ascended to full dictatorship, his diabolical manifesto came to life. The first gas chambers became operational in 1940. Roosevelt was privy to this information as he drafted the Jan. 6, 1941, State of the Union, also known as the “Four Freedoms” speech. Biden opened his State of the Union with Roosevelt’s words, “I address you at a moment unprecedented in the history of the Union.” Why was this line significant then…and now?

Roosevelt and the United States had not yet entered the war that was raging across Europe. That would not happen until Japan bombed Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, some 11 months after Roosevelt’s address to Congress on Capitol Hill. American and British intelligence from overseas had alerted Roosevelt of the growing threat that Hitler had perpetrated on the world scene. However, Americans and Washington politicians, many sitting in the very room that Roosevelt delivered this State of the Union to, wanted the country to stay out of the conflict and remain neutral. What was happening across the pond to Great Britian, and other European countries such as Poland, Austria, and France due the politically poisonous rhetoric of Hitler was of no concern to many Americans. Why should they be alerted to a danger that could not ever reach the shores of the United States? Did they as Americans have the responsibility to act in a humane manner to save the lives of possibly millions and future generations of human souls? America in early 1941 did not see Hitler as a domestic threat. Some saw him as a tyrant, others agreed with Hitler’s sentiments and his rather unorthodox methods. Yes. That was America in 1941. Roosevelt had seen the intelligence reports. He had conversations with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill. He saw the signs on the world stage. In his address to Congress 83 years ago, Roosevelt noted that “when the dictators are ready to make war upon us, they will not wait for an act of war on our part. They (Hitler) did not wait for Norway or Belgium, or the Netherlands to commit an act of war.” Roosevelt was sounding the alarm to wake America up to the very real threat to American democracy.

Flashing forward in time, Biden concluded the same inference in remarking that “it is we who face am unprecedented moment in the history of the Union.” In his address, Roosevelt perceived that the fundamental four freedoms are “the freedom of speech and expression, everywhere in the world,” “the freedom to worship God in their own way, everywhere in the world,” “the freedom of want, everywhere in the world,” and “the freedom from fear, anywhere in the world.” Bridging the gap between Roosevelt and Biden, those very same freedoms are under attack at this moment, as they are in Ukraine and Gaza … and domestically. MAGA supporters and the GOP are marching in sync with Trump and his quest to restore himself to the seat of power in the White House. The “I’ll be dictator for one day” presidential candidate’s supporters do not believe that their chosen one is a threat to American security. They do not believe that he is a threat to American democracy. They are in lockstep with the banning of books, the marginalization and stigmatization of Black and Brown Americans, the stripping away of women’s reproductive rights and the power of choice, red state legislative moves to silence the Black vote, and the attempt to overthrow the American vote in its entirety by insurrection. The threat to American society does not come with a reckoning from across the pond. It comes from within the most insular part of America. The question that remains is will President Biden and the Democrats arouse a significant enough alarm in Black America to stir up the Black vote in November?