President Makes Impromptu Stop, Poses for Selfies at Soul Food Restaurant

CHARLESTON, S.C. — While in Charleston on Monday to kick off the South Carolina leg of his 2024 presidential campaign, President Joe Biden made an impromptu stop at one of the city’s best known soul food restaurants.

The visit to Hannibal’s Soul Kitchen, a family owned restaurant in the largely Black East Side section of Charleston, was a light-hearted contrast to a day that began with the president denouncing White supremacism in a historic church that in 2015 was the site of one of the nation’s most horrifying race-related mass murders.

Aggressively courting the Black voters he needs to win reelection, Biden told attendees at an event at the Mother Emanuel AME Church that “the word of God was pierced by bullets of hate [and] rage,” when gunman Dylann Roof shot eight parishioners and the church’s pastor to death during an evening Bible class.

He said the bullets fired that night were “propelled not just by gunpowder, but by a poison, a poison that has for too long haunted this nation.”

That’s “white supremacy,” he said, the view by some whites that they are superior to other races. “It is a poison, throughout our history, that’s ripped this nation apart. This has no place in America. Not today, tomorrow or ever.”

The president spent about four hours at the church, before finally departing for the waiting Air Force One at Joint Base Charleston.

It was then, no doubt encouraged by Rep. James Clyburn, D-S.C., who was riding with him, that Biden decided to drop in at Hannibal’s.

Founded in 1985, the modest restaurant decorated with paintings by African American artists and photographs of Black jazz greats, is lauded locally for its signature crab rice meal, collard greens with smoked neck bones, liver and onions, shark steak and fried chicken gizzards.

Having removed his tie and left it in the black SUV in which he was traveling, Biden made his way into Hannibal’s clutching a dark baseball cap in his left hand.

With pool reporters following him inside and Clyburn beaming, the president first approached the family of owners and addressed L.J. Huger, whose daughters now run the restaurant.

“Do you know these women?” Biden asked with a broad smile, referring to Huger’s daughters, Safiya Grant and Felicity Huger.

“I’m the old patriarch, like you,” Huger replied jovially.

They chatted for a few minutes about children and grandchildren, then Huger introduced him to someone he called “a union man.”

“Hey man, how are you?” Biden asked.

With that, the president moved around the small dining room, taking selfies and chatting for a few minutes out of earshot of the pool.

Biden isn’t the first presidential hopeful to have visited Hannibal’s; in fact, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made a similar stop in 2016.

Before the pool was ushered out, Huger told the reporters that the restaurant has “been feeding the ‘soul of the city’ for more than 40 years because what the restaurant lacks in ambience, they more than make up for in taste.”

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