Biden repeats shifting claim of civil rights activism in 1960s

President Biden repeated a claim Monday that he was “very engaged” in the civil rights movement during the 1960s — a story that has changed as the president has told it over the years.

Biden said that he worked in the movement “as a kid” during a Labor Day event in Pennsylvania on Monday. The president has repeated the anecdote numerous times during his career despite himself contradicting the claim on at least one occasion.

“I got very engaged — in my case — in the civil rights movement,” Biden remarked. “As a kid, I worked a lot in the movement.”

Last year, during a White House event, Biden said he “came out of the civil rights movement.” A year earlier during a town hall with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, he said he was involved in desegregating restaurants.

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However, in 1987, Biden acknowledged that he was not a civil rights activist and never marched during the movement.

“During the ’60s, I was, in fact, very concerned about the civil rights movement,” Biden, who was running for president at the time, said during a speech in 1987. “I was not an activist. I worked at an 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,” he continued. “I was not anywhere else.”

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That same year, the Miami Herald reported that Biden admitted he was “never an activist” and did not march in Selma and that the Vietnam War was not a big issue when he was in college.

“I was a middle-class kid in a sports coat,” Biden said in September 1987, according to the Herald.

During the campaign that year, advisers had “gently reminded” Biden that he never marched during the movement, the New York Times reported in 2019. He continued to retell the story anyway.

While Biden appears to have been present at a walkout of a segregationist restaurant in the 1960s, Frank Hutchins, the Black student who was denied service during the incident, told the Philadelphia Inquirer in 1987 that Biden was “oblivious” about the situation, according to the Washington Post. Hutchins said Biden and the other White students at the restaurant were not aware of what happened to him.

In addition, a related claim Biden has repeated is that he was once arrested during a civil rights protest, which was rated “false” by PolitiFact earlier this year. There is evidence a protest occurred near Biden’s home in Delaware in 1959 when he was a teenager, but there is no evidence Biden was among those arrested.

The Washington Post gave Biden its harshest fact-check rating of “Four Pinocchios” for the claim.

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Ultimately, after he was called out for the claims about his activism, for allegedly plagiarizing speeches and for misrepresenting his academic record, Biden was forced to end his 1988 campaign early.

The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

“Defeating systemic racism and realizing this nation’s promise for all its people has been a driving cause of Joe Biden’s life,” White House spokesperson Andrew Bates told the Washington Post when asked about Biden’s claims during the 2020 campaign.

“He is proud to have stood against the scourge of segregation and would use every single day in the White House to bring our country together and uphold the rights and dignity of every single American.”