KENOSHA, Wis. (CN) — Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden made a trip to Kenosha, Wisconsin, on Thursday, participating in a town hall-style community meeting focused on hope and optimism at a local church shortly after meeting with the family of Jacob Blake, a Black man shot in the back by Kenosha police 11 days ago.
Biden, who was joined by his wife Jill, arrived for his first campaign trip to Wisconsin two days after President Donald Trump made his own high-profile visit to the area, during which the president surveyed destroyed businesses and hammered hard on a law and order message that praised law enforcement, Wisconsin Republicans and his own administration for a swift response to quell violent unrest that erupted after Blake was shot seven times by officer Rusten Sheskey on Aug. 23.
Immediately after arriving at Milwaukee’s General Mitchell International Airport, Biden met privately with members of Blake’s family at the airport, some of whom participated in the meeting virtually.
Biden mentioned during Thursday’s church gathering that he spoke to Blake on the phone during that meeting and that he is out of the intensive care unit at a Milwaukee hospital, where he has been since Flight for Life transported him there after the shooting.
By contrast, Trump did not meet with Blake’s family during his visit on Tuesday and said then that he ended a call with them after becoming displeased with how many lawyers were involved.
According to a Biden press pool, several dozen people awaited the former vice president’s arrival at Grace Lutheran Church in Kenosha on Thursday. The crowd was reportedly Biden-friendly for the most part, but a smaller group of Trump supporters were gathered up the street from the church waving flags and signs.
The church event was a relatively low-key gathering of about two dozen people, all wearing masks and carefully adhering to social distancing guidelines against a backdrop of stained glass and Christian iconography.
When moderator Tim Mahone, a board member of a Kenosha-based scholarship fund, went to shake Biden’s hand early in the meeting, Biden chuckled and said “we can’t do that,” instead offering Mahone an elbow bump.
The Democratic candidate presented a stark, hopeful alternative to the tone of Trump’s visit two days earlier, which focused almost exclusively on the damages the community incurred during the protests over Blake’s shooting and painted the law enforcement response to the unrest as a roaring success, thanks in no small part to his administration’s actions.
Biden spent much of the roughly 90-minute town hall meeting seated in front the church’s pews taking notes and listening to testimony from locals, which included the former president of a Kenosha firefighter’s union, the owner of a business looted during the unrest, an area criminal defense attorney and the president of the Kenosha Common Council.
Systemic racism and institutional barriers facing Black Americans came up early and often, which Biden readily acknowledged is a legitimate structural inequity that exists in the nation.
Tim Thompkins, a Kenosha resident and former Marine, pointed to disparities in employment, education, criminal justice and housing that disproportionately stack the deck against the Black community.
Angela Cunningham, a defense attorney at ADC Law in Kenosha and a former Milwaukee prosecutor, said she hoped a Biden presidency would address laws that protect police who kill people and over-policing in Black and brown communities that serves as a gateway to members of those communities getting trapped in the criminal justice machinery.
Cunningham asked specifically for a system compiling transparent data on charges against minority defendants, as “anybody who’s not in court every day won’t see that, and that data is not readily available.”