In the midst of nationwide unrest and international demonstrations about race relations and police use of force sparked by the death of a black man, George Floyd, in Minneapolis, Joe Biden recalled the start of his career being shaped by similar racial tensions.
Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in 1968 during Biden’s last year of law school at Syracuse University, sparking riots in Wilmington, Delaware.
“Our city was in flames,” Biden said while recalling the period in remarks to a predominantly black church in Wilmington on Monday.
The governor at the time, Charles Terry, kept the National Guard activated in the state for nine months, even after riots had stopped. That environment, Biden said, prompted him to quit his job at a private law firm and become a public defender. “I had a job with a good law firm,” Biden said. “And after about five months, watching people on the National Guard — I quit [and] became a public defender.”
The mention of being a public defender is one of the ways that the former vice president points to his civil rights bona fides on the campaign trail. And with the current unrest across the United States, he is in a prime position to take the role of being a listener, a healer, and a civil rights leader as a large amount of outrage goes toward President Trump.
“I came out of the civil rights movement,” Biden said in February and frequently on the campaign trail.
But as the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee says that he hopes to end “systemic racism” and focus on character, hate, and the “soul” of the nation, policies he supported during his near-half-century in public life continue to haunt him.
Trump’s campaign published a blog post on Tuesday calling Biden a “race baiter who seeks to sow division.” The Philadelphia Tribune on Tuesday asked whether the policies he pushed for negatively affected black people. “There’s no evidence of that,” Biden said.
From one perspective, it is a strange position for Biden to be in.
After all, for eight years, he was vice president to the first black president, Barack Obama. Support for Biden among black voters in South Carolina delivered him a decisive win in the state’s February primary race, cementing his path to the nomination after badly losing the Iowa and New Hampshire contests. The 77-year-old kicked off his presidential bid slamming Trump for his “very fine people on both sides” reaction to the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, that drew white supremacists.
One of the first experiences that shaped his views was a job as the only white lifeguard at a pool in a black neighborhood in Wilmington in the summer of 1962, when Biden was 19.
“Most of the people I got to know there had literally never talked to a white person,” Biden wrote in his 2007 book, Promises to Keep. The pool is now named after Biden.
He got involved in the Democratic Party, Biden wrote in his memoir, through a boss who in 1969 had him join the Democratic Forum, a group trying to reshape the party to reflect civil rights policies.
At times, Biden has exaggerated at best and falsified at worst claims about his civil rights activism.
He has often said that he marched in civil rights demonstrations, but aides would remind him that he did not personally participate. Earlier this year, he claimed that he was arrested in South Africa in the 1970s while trying to see Nelson Mandela, but his campaign later clarified that he was just separated from them at the airport.
Two claims have been corroborated: In 1961, Biden was part of a group that walked out of a restaurant that refused to serve a black classmate, and in 1962, he picketed outside a segregated movie theater.
Biden now points to his brief time as a public defender in 1969 as a major point in his civil rights record (exact dates are unknown, but he appears to have held the job at least six months), but he gave a different reason for taking the job in his memoir than what he said at the church on Monday. Biden said that he was sitting in a courtroom feeling sympathetic toward a defendant. “I walked across Rodney Square and into the basement of a three-story building and applied for work in the public defender’s office,” he wrote.
But it is what happened when Biden got to the Senate that comes under scrutiny from activists working against racism today. Though Biden had a 100% rating from the NAACP from 2005 to 2006, the policies he pushed, the friends he made, and some of his statements do not fit in with the goals of most of those marching and organizing in the wake of Floyd’s death.
In the 1970s, Biden worked with segregationist senators to oppose federally mandated integration busing, calling it a matter of “black pride.”
And he was friendly with segregationist senators such as Jesse Helms, James O. Eastland, and Herman Talmadge. “All these men became my friends,” Biden said in his 2008 farewell address to the Senate. He called South Carolina Sen. Strom Thurmond one of his “closest friends.”
Biden helped lead the charge for a landmark 1994 crime bill, the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, which created “three strikes” mandatory life sentences for repeat offenders and increased prison funding by about $10 billion, among other provisions. He warned of “predators on our streets” who were “beyond the pale” while speaking in support of the bill.
Some activists argue it contributed to mass incarceration, which Biden denies. He points out that the Violence Against Women Act and the federal assault weapons ban was part of the legislation. Last year, he said that the sentencing disparity for crack and powder cocaine in the bill was wrong and said he opposed the “three strikes” provision that created a mandatory life sentence after two violent felonies.
Biden’s history of racial blunders, such as calling Obama “articulate and bright and clean,” telling a largely black audience that Republican 2012 presidential nominee Mitt Romney would “put you all back in chains,” and saying that he can’t go into a 7-Eleven without hearing “a slight Indian accent,” don’t help.
Not only are those stumbles and positions lines of attack for the Trump campaign now, but they have also haunted him through the Democratic presidential primary.
Last summer, ex-presidential hopeful New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker called Biden an “architect of mass incarceration” after Biden released his criminal justice reform plan.
Most memorably, California Sen. Kamala Harris put Biden on blast during the first Democratic presidential primary debate for opposing federally mandated integration busing and working with segregationists in the 1970s.
“It was hurtful to hear you talk about the reputations of two United States senators who built their reputations and career on the segregation of race in this country,” said Harris, who is now up for consideration to be Biden’s running mate. “There was a little girl in California who was bused to school every day. And that little girl was me.”
Biden often grows visibly agitated when challenged on his civil rights record.
In a May radio interview days before Floyd’s death that ended with Biden suggesting that black people having trouble deciding whether to vote for him or Trump “ain’t black,” the candidate grew visibly agitated when host Charlamagne tha God questioned Biden on the 1994 crime bill.
“Other things increased mass incarceration,” Biden said. When Charlamagne tha God brought up that Hillary Clinton apologized for her husband President Bill Clinton’s role in pushing the bill, Biden said, “She was wrong.” He added: “That wasn’t the crime bill. It was the drug legislation. It was their institution of mandatory minimums, which I opposed.”
Biden now claims to be a leader in the quest to end racism. But the question for Biden is whether he can lead that movement amid questions about his record and his reluctance to atone for it or whether voters driven to action by Floyd’s death and the resulting protests loathe Trump enough that the messy portions of Biden’s background will not discourage them from voting for him.
