President Biden on Tuesday again claimed that he was part of the civil rights movement of the 1960s — a story he has repeatedly rewritten and even debunked himself in the 1980s.
Mr. Biden’s latest version of the story came during a White House ceremony where he established a national monument to Emmet Till, whose 1955 murder sparked the civil rights movement. The president boasted about his legacy of civil rights advocacy to the largely Black crowd.
“Telling the truth and the full history of our nation is important. … It’s a lesson I learned coming out of — not like real leaders in the civil rights movement — but when I came out of the civil rights movement as a kid, as a public defender,” Mr. Biden said.
However, Mr. Biden acknowledged in 1987 that he was not engaged in the civil rights movement and never marched for equality.
“During the 1960s, I was, in fact, very concerned about the civil rights movement,” Mr. Biden said during a campaign speech for his 1988 presidential run. “I was not an activist. I worked at all all-Black swimming pool in the east side of Wilmington, Delaware. I was involved in what they were thinking, in what they were feeling.”
“But I was not out marching. I was not down in Selma. I was not anywhere else,” he said. “I was a suburbanite kid who got a dose of exposure to what was happening to black Americans in my own city.”
That same year, the Miami Herald wrote a story noting that Biden was not an “activist” or marched in support of civil rights during the 1960s.
“I was a middle-class kid in a sports coat,” Mr. Biden said, according to the article.
Despite his acknowledgment that he was not an activist, he has repeatedly made claims about his efforts to show solidarity with African Americans.
In September, Mr. Biden insisted he was “very engaged” in the civil rights movement.
“I got very engaged — in my case — in the civil rights movement,” Mr. Biden said at the Labor Day event in Pennsylvania. “As a kid, I worked a lot in the movement.”
In 2021, Mr. Biden said he “came out of the civil rights movement.” As a presidential candidate in 2020, he told the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People that he was involved in desegregating restaurants, though there is no evidence he worked to do that.
Mr. Biden also has repeatedly suggested that he was arrested during a civil rights demonstration.
“I did not walk in the shoes of generations of students who walked these grounds, but I walked other grounds,” Mr. Biden said in a speech at Morehouse College and Clark Atlanta University, a historically Black college and university. “Because I’m so damn old, I was there as well.”
“You think I’m kidding? It seems like yesterday was the first time I got arrested,” Mr. Biden said.
PolitiFact has rated this claim false, saying there was no evidence that Mr. Biden was arrested during a civil rights protest, despite his repeated claims.
The Washington Post gave him Four Pinocchios — its harshest rating for untrue claims — for the story, saying “too many elements do not add up.”
Although Mr. Biden has repeated this story at least three times according to a tally by The Washington Times, he conceded in 2020 he was not arrested, adding to the ever-shifting story.
“I wasn’t arrested, I was stopped. I was not able to move where I wanted to go,” Mr. Biden told CNN.
• Jeff Mordock can be reached at jmordock@washingtontimes.com.
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