Hours before peaceful protests against police brutality were forcibly dispersed so that Donald Trump could pose with a Bible in front of St John’s church, Joe Biden also went to church. 

Head bowed, Biden prayed with community leaders at Bethel African Methodist Episcopal church in his home town of Wilmington, Delaware. For days the nation had been convulsed over the killing of George Floyd, a 46-year-old black man pinned under the knee of a white Minneapolis police officer for a fatal eight minutes and 46 seconds. 

The former vice-president then listened silently to members of the city’s black community express collective anger and anguish. Their message was clear: he must do more.

“The people in this room, we love you,” state senator Darius Brown told the former vice-president. “But we’re here not only to love you, but to push you.”

America faces a stark choice in November. But contrast is not a vision, say activists, scholars and strategists, echoing calls from protesters for changes to the economic and political conditions that led to the death of another black man in police custody. 

In the last several days, the official death toll of the Covid-19 outbreak, which has been disproportionately affecting black communities, surpassed 100,000 Americans, while the economic turmoil left more than 40 million people without jobs – all before Minneapolis erupted in furious protest, sparking demonstrations in cities across the country and the globe.

The compounding crises present a critical test of leadership for the 77-year-old presumptive Democratic nominee who has cast his candidacy as a “battle for the soul of the nation”.

“This has to be about more than beating Donald Trump,” Akunna Cook, the former president of the Black Economic Alliance. “It is not enough to just be better than Trump.”

So far, Biden, who was vice president under Barack Obama, the nation’s first black president, has sought to demonstrate he is capable of both listening and leading. On Sunday, he made an unannounced visit to a protest site in Wilmington. He hosted a virtual roundtable with mayors to discuss the upheaval. On Tuesday, he traveled to Philadelphia, the birthplace of American democracy, to confront the “racial wounds that have long plagued our country”. 

Cook, now a senior fellow at the Democratic thinktank Third Way, is encouraged but challenged Biden to do more to address deep-rooted racial and economic disparities.

“Biden has the latitude to be a transformational president and to have a transformational presidency,” she said. 

Biden won the Democratic primary on the strength of his support among black voters, particularly older, more moderate black voters who helped turn around his struggling presidential campaign starting in South Carolina. 

Yet this coalition alone will probably not be enough to beat Trump. Biden’s campaign has acknowledged he must also motivate younger and disaffected black voters who have lost faith in electoral politics. 

Many of them are in the streets protesting police killings and institutionalized racism at this moment, said Cliff Albright, the co-founder of Black Voters Matter. He fears Democrats are charting a path that is vulnerable to low turnout.

“Come November, Democrats are going to be trying to figure out what it takes to get them out to vote,” Albright said. “They’re telling you what it will take. Does he listen? That will be the real test.”

The support of African American voters is critical to the success of any Democratic nominee. In 2016, black voter turnout fell for the first time in two decades, the result of disillusionment, compounded by voter disenfranchisement and Russia interference targeting African Americans online. 

Trump has made a show of his efforts to peel away black support for the Democratic party, despite his long history of racist remarks and behavior. His campaign hosts online gatherings featuring African American surrogates and seized on Biden’s comment last month that African American voters torn between him and the president “ain’t black”. 

Since the protests began, Biden has sought to emphasize unity and solidarity, drawing a sharp contrast with Trump who characterized those demonstrating as “thugs” and “terrorists” and threatened to deploy the military if governors failed to “dominate” the protests. Amid the national upheaval, Biden has expressed hope that “the blinders have been taken off” for many Americans, creating space for substantive change.

A Monmouth University poll conducted as protests erupted, found more Americans trusted Biden than Trump to handle race relations in the country. Fifty-two per cent said they have a great deal or some confidence in Biden’s ability to address the issue while only 40% said they felt the same about the president.

Jabari Nyomba, 30, was among a crowd of thousands that circled the Barclays Center in Brooklyn to protest police brutality, chanting “I can’t breathe” and carrying signs that memorialized George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery.

“We’re tired of institutional racism,” he said. “We’re tired of seeing our brothers and sisters getting killed by the ones that are supposed to serve and protect us. I’ve just had enough.”

Nyomba said he hoped the fury on display would be channeled into voting come November.

“These protests demonstrate that people are activated,” said Aimee Allison, president of She the People, a political advocacy group focused on women of color. “But I’m not hearing the same excitement about Biden and about the Democrats because they haven’t stepped up yet.”

Allison said Biden not only needs to lay out specific policy proposals but to demonstrate that he has the “political will” to implement them. Without a robust political agenda that responds to their demands, she said it would be “hubris” to expect young black voters to turn out.

In his speech on Tuesday, Biden called on Congress to pass legislation that would ban police chokeholds, create model use of force standards and end the transfer of military weapons to police forces. He also recommitted to creating a national police oversight commission during his first 100 days in office. 

Biden said he plans to set forth a detailed set of policy proposals in the coming weeks, building on his six-point “plan for black America” that addresses the racial wealth gap, voting rights and environmental justice. 

Yet he acknowledged that the scale of change needed was greater than any one election or one president.

“That action will not be completed in the first 100 days of my presidency – or even an entire term,” he said. “It is the work of a generation.”

National moments of racial strife have bracketed Biden’s 50-year political career. He was first drawn to public office after the national guard occupied Wilmington in response to the race riots that followed Martin Luther King Jr’s assassination in 1968. Entering the race for president in 2019, Biden said he was motivated by the president’s failure to unequivocally condemn white supremacists in the wake of violent clashes in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017. 

But Biden’s record on matters of race is complicated. His treatment of Anita Hill during the 1991 Supreme Court nomination hearings for Clarence Thomas and his authorship of a 1994 crime bill that many activists and researchers say led to an era of mass incarceration are still points of contention.

During the primary, his more liberal rivals attacked him over his past stances on mandatory school busing, abortion and marijuana legalization. And his comment about black voters renewed a discussion about whether Biden – and the Democratic party – took their support for granted.

As the nation reckons with its history, so too must Biden, said Keneshia Grant, a political science professor at Howard University. Apologizing for his role in crime bill, parts of which he still defends, would be a start, she said.

“We are in the middle of an uprising unseen in this nation in at least 50 years. It cannot be politics as usual,” Grant said. “It has to be different.” 

The events of the last week have also recast his search for a vice-presidential candidate. Pressure was already building on Biden to choose a black woman, a list that includes California senator Kamala Harris, congresswoman Val Demings of Florida and former Georgia House Democratic leader Stacey Abrams.

Others are more concerned about the candidate’s criminal justice credentials, arguing that prosecutors should not be considered. Progressives have singled out Minnesota senator Amy Klobuchar, a former top prosecutor in Minnesota, as particularly problematic, though Harris, a former state attorney general, and Demings, a former Orlando police chief, have also come under renewed scrutiny.

Perhaps more important than who is on his ticket is who Biden mobilizes behind him, said Rashad Robinson, the president of Color of Change, a racial justice organization. Biden, he said, must do more to engage grassroots organizers leading the next generation of civil rights leaders. 

“This is a fight for political power and there are deeply entrenched forces that will stand in the way of any change,” he said. “He cannot just aspirationally ask us to come together. He has to get in this fight with us.”

Ankita Rao contributed to this article from Brooklyn