President Joe Biden claimed during a speech this week that he was arrested during a civil rights movement demonstration – a claim he has previously had to recant.
“I did not walk in the shoes of generations of students who walked these grounds, but I walked other grounds,” Biden said in a speech on the grounds of Morehouse College and Clark Atlanta University, two historically black Atlanta colleges. “Because I’m so damn old, I was there as well.
“You think I’m kidding,” he continued. “It seems like yesterday the first time I got arrested.”
Did Joe Biden just claim he was arrested during the civil rights movement? That never happened. pic.twitter.com/VcKVS2hrN8
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) January 11, 2022
This is not the first time Biden has claimed he was arrested for protesting in favor of civil rights. He told a similar story in 1987, during one of his previous failed presidential campaigns, but later had to correct the record.
“I came out of the civil rights movement. I was one of those guys who sat-in and marched and all that stuff,” Biden said during the campaign.
He then clarified: “I was not down marching. I was not down in Selma. I was not anywhere else. I was a suburbanite kid who got a dose of exposure to what was happening to black Americans in my own city.”
And in 2020, he absurdly claimed he had been arrested while visiting Nelson Mandela in South Africa.
“This day, 30 years ago, Nelson Mandela walked out of prison and entered into discussions about apartheid,” he said on the campaign trail.
“I had the great honor of meeting him. I had the great honor of being arrested with our U.N. ambassador on the streets of Soweto trying to get to see him on Robben Island,” he lied.
Biden was forced to recant that story as well, telling CNN, “I wasn’t arrested, I was stopped. I was not able to move where I wanted to go.”
