Joe Biden at the second night of the Democratic debate pushed back on charges that his 1970s-era opposition to school busing as a senator disqualifies him from claiming his party’s 2020 presidential nomination.
The former vice president’s remarks stemmed from a heated exchange with California Sen. Kamala Harris, who asked the longtime Delaware senator if he would renounce his previous opposition to federally mandated school busing.
“I did not oppose busing in America,” Biden said. “What I opposed is busing ordered by the Department of Education. That’s what I opposed.”
However, records show Biden opposed forced integration of America’s public schools more broadly — regardless of which federal agency directed it.
“I think the concept of busing … that we are going to integrate people so that they all have the same access and they learn to grow up with one another and all the rest, is a rejection of the whole movement of black pride,” Biden said in a 1975 interview.
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Public schools in Delaware were not ordered to integrate until a court order in 1974, when a U.S. district court required the New Castle County Board of Education to create a desegregation plan for the county’s schools.
During that same interview, Biden declared that “busing doesn’t work” and that such policies would create “a totally homogeneous society” that would ultimately harm black communities.
“There are those of we social planners who think somehow that if we just subrogate [sic] man’s individual characteristics and traits by making sure that a presently heterogeneous society becomes a totally homogeneous society, that somehow we’re going to solve our social ills,” Biden added. “And quite to the contrary.”
By 1975, Biden supported an anti-busing amendment proposed by Sen. Jesse Helmes of North Carolina.
Biden has long defended his record on busing. Gearing up for his second presidential bid, Biden wrote in his 2007 memoir that busing was a “liberal train wreck” that “was tearing people apart.”
“The quality of the schools in and around Wilmington was already suffering, and they would never be the same,” he wrote. “White parents were terrified that their children would be shipped to the toughest neighborhoods in Wilmington; black parents were terrified that their children would be targets of violence in suburban schools.”
