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In April 2021, an old quote attributed to U.S. President Joe Biden saw a resurgence in shares on social media, overwhelmingly from users who disapproved of his purported claim that the death of George Floyd in May 2020 had had a greater worldwide impact than the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. The remarks attributed to Biden were: Dr. King's assassination did not have the worldwide impact that George Floyd's death did: To demonstrate the popularity of the meme, the following screenshot shows just a selection of posts from Facebook alone: The quotation was authentic, and originated in remarks Biden made at a campaign event in June 2020. As such, we are issuing a rating of Correct Attribution. The following is an excerpted transcript of the relevant portion of Biden's remarks, which came at a roundtable event on COVID-19 and the American economy, in Philadelphia, on June 11, 2020. Video of the remarks can be viewed below. Around halfway through the discussion, U.S. Rep. Dwight Evans, a Democrat from Pennsylvania, asked Biden a question that alluded to ongoing social and racial tensions in the United States, and how his campaign pledge to restore the soul of America related to those issues. In response, the then-presumptive Democratic nominee criticized then-President Donald Trump for his remarks on white supremacist violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, and his divisive and inflammatory comments about Mexican immigrants. He noted that people of color were being disproportionately struck with the COVID-19 pandemic, and then moved into a discussion about the death of George Floyd, a Black man who died in May 2020 after a Minneapolis police officer knelt on his neck for almost nine minutes. Floyd's death sparked a renewed wave of protests about police brutality and racial injustice throughout the United States and in other parts of the world. Biden said: As the transcript and video show, Biden did indeed say Dr. King's assassination did not have the worldwide impact that George Floyd's death did, and the memes therefore quoted him accurately. In full context, Biden appeared to be making a point less about the relative historic importance of King's life and achievements, but rather the global audience that watched cellphone video footage of Floyd's death. However, Biden also referred to the millions of people marching around the world in response to Floyd's death, so his argument did not appear to be limited only to the manner in which modern technology enabled footage of Floyd's death to reach a global audience. Floyd's death did indeed inspire protests and demonstrations of solidarity throughout the world, in the ensuing days and weeks. In Germany and England, high-profile professional soccer players made gestures of support for Floyd, and for the broader Black Lives Matter movement. In the English Premier League, the most-watched soccer league in the world, players replaced the names on their jerseys with the words Black Lives Matter, for the final 12 games of the 2019-20 season, and began taking a knee before every game, in the aftermath of Floyd's death — a ritual that has persisted until time of publication, almost one year after the death of George Floyd.
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