PHILADELPHIA — President Biden claimed twice on Wednesday that he was involved in the Civil Rights Movement as he courted black voters in battleground Pennsylvania — despite admitting in the past that he was not.
“I got involved as a kid in the Civil Rights Movement,” Biden, 81, told a group of black officials and local residents at a Philadelphia restaurant and jazz bar, repeating himself later in the talk and specifying 1969 as the date his supposed activism began.
“Like I said, in 1969, I got involved deeply in the Civil Rights Movement, and those of you who are Pennsylvanians know that Delaware used to be a slave state and a southern state and it’s that attitudes — I mean, for real,” he added.
Delaware was a slave state that never abolished the practice before the ratification of the 13th Amendment in 1865; however, the state never seceded from the Union to join the Confederacy.
At a different point in his remarks, Biden stated: “I know a lot about HBCUs [historically black colleges and universities] because Delaware State HBCU was the place I got organized and started.”
Biden regularly claims involvement in the movement, telling radio host Howard Stern last month that he “got arrested standing on the porch with a black family” during civil rights protests — despite no evidence of the anecdote happening.
During the 2020 presidential campaign, Delaware State University was forced to clarify that Biden had never been a student there after the then-candidate reiterated his claim that “I got started” at the school
Weeks later, the now-president said he had been “raised” in a black church in Delaware and attended organizing sessions there, prompting denials from longtime congregants.
In 2022, Biden told students at historically black colleges in Atlanta that he was arrested during civil rights protests — for which there is also no evidence.
During his first run for president, Biden acknowledged that he was not very involved in the movement.
“During the ’60s, I was, in fact, very concerned about the civil rights movement,” he said in 1987, according to a New York Times report. “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 added. “I was not anywhere else. I was a suburbanite kid who got a dose of exposure to what was happening to black Americans.”
However, as far back as 1983, the outlet said, Biden had claimed to have “participated in sit-ins to desegregate restaurants and movie houses.”
