(Luis Cornelio, Headline USA) President Joe Biden has once more touted his contested involvement in politics stemming from the Civil Rights Movement, despite his past opposition to busing and integration.
In a re-election effort to sway black voters during a speech in Charleston, South Carolina, Biden claimed on Monday, “I’ve spent more time in the Bethel AME Church in Wilmington, Delaware, than I have — than most people I know, Black or white, have spent in that church. Because that’s where I started. No, I’m serious. It started with the Civil Rights Movement.”
Biden was repeating a variation of a lie he has told over and over and over again — but there are two problems with the story:
1️⃣ Longtime congregants of Black churches in Wilmington have zero recollection of him attending as a child.
2️⃣ Biden was never a civil rights activist;… https://t.co/9aDksVCNSx
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) January 8, 2024
Biden previously uttered similar remarks, leaving many puzzled due to the absence of supporting evidence. For instance, as reported by a New York Post editorial, Biden had previously asserted attending Civil Rights organization sessions at Wilmington Union Baptist Church.
However, longtime members of black churches in Wilmington have no recollection of his attendance, as refuted by the RNC Research and the Daily Mail. Biden himself admitted in 1987 that he wasn’t an activist, stating: “I was not an activist … I was not out marching. I was not down in Selma. I was not anywhere else.”
Instead, Biden has been heavily criticized for his associations with segregationist senators and his prior racially insensitive statements, including once remarking that integration could lead to a “racial jungle.”
As compiled by the Heritage Foundation, in 1977, then-Senator Biden claimed that enforced busing for school desegregation would force his children to “grow up in a racial jungle.”
NEW: @USCGouldLaw prof @droithmayr spotted this 1977 Biden quote. He warns that unless there is “orderly integration” (he favored housing, not busing) “My children are going to grow up in a jungle, the jungle being a racial jungle . . ” w/@AsteadWesley https://t.co/yQpjw0V2bN pic.twitter.com/7xPdtqjehB
— Sheryl Gay Stolberg (@SherylNYT) July 15, 2019
Biden’s history of opposing integration was so evident that his vice president, Kamala Harris, during her presidential candidacy, vehemently rebuked it.
“There was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools and she was bused to school every day. That little girl was me,” Harris mentioned in a June 2019 debate against Biden.
She added, “That’s where the federal government must step in, that’s why we have the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act… Because there are moments in history where states fail to preserve the civil rights of all people.”
BREAKING: Joe Biden has picked Senator Kamala Harris as his running mate.
How nice of him to pick her after she called him a vile racist on the debate stage a little over a year ago. pic.twitter.com/d5DDiBi7m5
— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) August 11, 2020
In response, Biden stated, “I did not oppose busing in America… What I opposed is busing ordered by the Department of Education. That’s what I opposed.”
Additionally, Biden has proudly referenced his friendship with segregationist Sens. James O. Eastland, D-Miss., and Herman E. Talmadge, D-Ga.
“Even in the days when I got there, the Democratic Party still had seven or eight old-fashioned Democratic segregationists,” Biden reminisced about his ties to the senator. “You’d get up and you’d argue like the devil with them. Then you’d go down and have lunch or dinner together. The political system worked. We were divided on issues, but the political system worked.”
