Joe Biden insisted there was a difference between historical figures who owned slaves and Confederate leaders who fought to maintain slavery.
“The idea of comparing whether or not George Washington owned slaves or Thomas Jefferson owned slaves, and somebody who was in rebellion and committed treason trying to take down a union to keep slavery, I think there’s a distinction,” Biden said Tuesday in Wilmington, Delaware, at his first press conference in almost 90 days.
The two-term vice president and 2020 presumptive Democratic presidential nominee said Confederate statues “belong in museums, they don’t belong in public places.” But he added there’s an “obligation to protect” monuments such as the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D.C.
As the United States grapples with racial injustice following the death of George Floyd, a black man who died after a white Minneapolis police officer knelt on his neck for almost nine minutes, activists have toppled statues depicting figures deemed to have held offensive views on race.
Another former president, Woodrow Wilson, had his name stripped from Princeton University’s public policy school and one of the institution’s colleges over his race relations opinions. Wilson, who was the White House occupant from 1913 to 1921, also served as Princeton’s president from 1902 to 1910.
“Any institution that chose a name and wants to now jettison that name, that’s a decision for them to make, for whatever reason they make it. So I’m assuming the Board of Trustees at Princeton University made a judgment about the Woodrow Wilson School,” he said.
Biden, who committed to not holding any campaign rallies until public health experts believed it was safe, said he could “hardly wait” to debate Trump on Sept. 29 at the University of Notre Dame. He also said he is yet to be tested for COVID-19 because he hasn’t exhibited any symptoms.
[Also read: ‘America needs a president’: Biden rips Trump’s handling of coronavirus]
