President Obama Tells Mayors Racism is a 'Blight' on Nation

President Obama told hundreds of mayors in San Francisco Friday that this week's massacre at a historic African-American church in Charleston, South Carolina, shows that racism still haunts the United States.

"The apparent motivations of the shooter reminds us that racism remains a blight we have to combat together," Obama said during a keynote speech to the U.S. Conference of Mayors.

"We have made great progress," the president said. "But we have to be vigilant because it still lingers -- and when it is poisoning the minds of young people, it betrays our ideals and tears our democracy apart."

The president also used the speech to insist he has not given up on federal gun control reforms, even after being rebuffed by Congress in the wake of the December 2014 slaughter of 20 first-graders and six adults at a school in Newtown, Connecticut.

"If Congress had passed some common-sense gun safety reforms after Newtown -- after a group of children had been gunned down in their own classroom -- reforms that 90 percent of the American people supported -- we wouldn’t have prevented every act of violence or even most. We don't know it would have prevented what happened in Charleston, no reform can guarantee the elimination of violence," Obama said. "But we might still have some Americans with us. We might have stopped one shooter, some families might still be whole, y'all might have to attend fewer funerals."

"And we should be strong enough to acknowledge this," he said. "At the very least we should be able to talk about this issue as citizens, without demonizing all gun owners, who are overwhelmingly law-abiding but also without suggesting that any debate about this involves a wild-eyed plot to take everybody's guns away."

The president was in California to attend four Democratic fundraisers and to speak to at the mayoral gathering. On Friday, he also met with Gov. Jerry Brown to discuss the drought.

Obama planned to spend Friday night in San Francisco and head back to D.C. Saturday.

On Thursday, at a star-studded Hollywood fundraiser hosted by Tyler Perry, the president garnered laughter when he made what he dubbed a "little Freudian slip."

"We should be reforming our criminal justice system in such a way that we are not incarcerating nonviolent offenders in ways that renders them incapable of getting a job after they leave office," he said, according to the White House pool report.

The 250 attendees contributed between $2,500 and $33,400 to see the president speak.  Obama also attended what the Democratic National Committee billed as two round-table discussions while he was in California -- one Thursday at television producer Chuck Lorre's Pacific Palisades home and another Friday at venture capitalist Shervin Pishevar's San Francisco home. Both came with a $33,400 price tag.

Obama also scheduled a more surprising stop while he was in L.A.: He swung by the home of Mark Maron, where he sat down in the outspoken comedian's garage studio to appear on Maron's podcast.

Friday's visit to the Bay Area was the president's 20th since he took office.