U.S. President Joe Biden has once again overstated his involvement in the civil rights movement of the 1960s.
At a White House event on Tuesday, the President proudly spoke of his civil rights advocacy record before a predominantly Black audience gathered to mark the creation of a national monument honoring Emmet Till, whose 1955 murder ignited the civil rights movement.
Biden stated, “Relaying the complete truth and history of our nation is of great importance. … This was a lesson I took away from the civil rights movement — not as a genuine leader, but from my involvement as a young man and as a public defender.”
However, Biden accepted in 1987 that he was not actively participating in the civil rights movement nor did he march for equality, according to The Washington Times.
“In the 1960s, I was deeply interested in the civil rights movement,” Biden said during his 1988 presidential campaign, as per The Times. “I was not an activist. I was employed at an all-Black swimming pool on Wilmington, Delaware’s east side. I was involved in understanding their thoughts and feelings.
“But I wasn’t marching out there. I wasn’t in Selma. I wasn’t in any other place. I was a suburban kid who got a firsthand look at what was happening to Black Americans in my own city.”
In 1987, the Miami Herald also reported that Biden was not an active participant in the civil rights movement. “I was just a middle-class kid in a sports coat,” he said, according to the Herald.
Despite this, Biden has insisted that his actions demonstrated support for the Black community. In September, he stated that he was “highly involved” in the civil rights movement.
“As a child, I was deeply involved — in my own way — in the civil rights movement. I put in a lot of work in the movement,” Biden stated on Labor Day in Pennsylvania.
In 2021, Biden asserted that he “emerged from the civil rights movement.”
During his 2020 presidential campaign, Biden told the NAACP that he was involved in restaurant desegregation efforts, although no evidence supports this claim, as per The Times.
Additionally, Biden has frequently claimed that he was arrested during a civil rights protest.
“I didn’t walk in the shoes of generations of students who have walked these grounds, but I have walked different grounds,” Biden stated at Morehouse College and Clark Atlanta University, a historically Black institution. “Since I’m quite old, I was there too.”
“You think I’m joking? It seems like just yesterday that I got arrested for the first time.”
However, Biden admitted in 2020 that he had not been arrested.
“I was not arrested, I was stopped. I was restricted from moving where I wanted to,” Biden told CNN.
