Joe Biden and segregation

Former Vice President of the United States, Joe Biden, has a mixed history with regard to racial segregation in the United States. Although an opponent of segregation and a supporter of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, as Senator for Delaware Biden was an influential Democratic opponent of certain types of court-ordered desegregation busing (a measure to help schools become integrated).

Biden also maintained an amiable and personal friendship with segregationist senators his entire political life. While initially praised as a positive element of Biden's bipartisanship, in recent years his friendship with such senators has been controversial. Biden's comments on the issue in 2019 – when he was running to be U.S. President – were criticized by Democratic primary opponents Kamala Harris and Cory Booker.

Background and Senate campaign

Main article: School segregation in the United States

Schools in the Southern United States were forced to racially integrate following the Alexander v. Holmes County ruling of 1969. Although "separate but equal" facilities and "Jim Crow" legislation (de jure segregation) were deemed unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court in the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954, it was the Alexander ruling which forced Southern school districts to implement desegregation plans to remedy the problem following years of obstruction from Southern segregationist senators. In response to the Alexander ruling, judges started to order desegregation busing plans in some Southern cities.

Northern U.S. schools remained thoroughly segregated through de facto segregation practices such as housing segregation. This created a number of all-white neighbourhoods and school districts, producing segregated schools without de jure racial discrimination. Many urban school boards enacted transfer and redistricting policies to reinforce this. In the 1960s-1970s, African-American parents filed lawsuits in protest, alleging racial discrimination; federal district courts agreed, and supported busing programs to take children from one district to another and integrate schools in that manner. The 1971 Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg decision, while discussing the Southern U.S., supported busing remedies when there as evidence of de jure segregation. Following the decision, the courts promptly ordered busing initiatives in cities shaped by housing segregation in the North and South, including California, Michigan and Colorado.

In his campaign for the senate, Biden said he supported the Swann decision but opposed "forced busing" as a remedy for de facto segregation. In Biden's 1972 campaign for the Senate, Biden said he supported African-American civil rights initiatives. He said Republicans were using busing as a scare tactic to court Southern white votes, and joined Senator J. Caleb Boggs (the Republican incumbent) in his opposition to a constitutional amendment banning busing, which was being advanced in the House of Representatives at the time. For this, and other pro-busing votes as Senator, he received opprobrium from his white constituents. Throughout the controversy, Biden's children attended private schools.

Busing plans were flawed; judges and political supporters of them advised other integration measures before resorting to busing as a last resort. As well as opposition from segregationist whites, A number of black urbanites also opposed busing as they felt their children were not being treated fairly in the suburban districts.

As Senator for Delaware

In 1974 Biden struck an anti-segregationist/pro-busing tone in two votes; Biden voted to table an amendment to an omnibus education bill promoted by Edward Gurney (R-FL) which contained anti-busing measures anti-school desegregation clauses. In May, Senator Robert Griffin (R-MI) attempted to revive an amended version of this amendment. Minority Leader Hugh Scott (R-PA) and Majority Leader Mike Mansfield (D-MT) offered a compromise to intact the text of Griffin's amendment but added the qualifier that such legislation was not intended to weaken the judiciary's power to enforce the 5th and 14th Amendments of the U.S. constitution. Biden voted in favor of this compromise.

Following these votes, Delaware residents formed the Neighborhood Schools Association to resist desegregation. The group organized a meeting at the Krebs School in Newport, Delaware. Biden gave a speech before the association in the school's auditorium, in which he assured them that his position on school busing was evolving as well as saying that supported busing only as a remedy for de jure and that any segregation in Delaware was de facto (and in his view beyond the authority of the courts). The crowd was unconvinced and heckled him until he yielded the microphone. Opposition to busing grew among whites in Wilmington, Delaware, where the legislature passed a school zoning scheme (Educational Advancement Act) which de facto delineated the Wilmington School District as predominately black school district. The prospect of a federally-mandated cross-district busing plan loomed over the town, and under pressure from white constituents Biden became one of the leading opponents of busing among Senate Democrats, aligning himself with civil rights opponent Senator Jesse Helms (R-NC). Biden and the anti-busing senators wanted to limit the scope of Title VI of Civil Rights Act of 1964 (non-discrimination in federally-assisted programs) and to prevent the federal government power forcing local authorities to desegregate their schools through the threat of withholding funds.

For the next four years after 1975, Biden took a harsher line on further legislative action to limit busing and desegregation. In that year, Helms proposed an anti-integration amendment to an education bill which would stop the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) collecting data about the race of students or teachers and therefore could not stop funding districts which refused to integrate. Biden supported this amendment, saying: "I am sure it comes as a surprise to some of my colleagues ... that a senator with a voting record such as mine stands up and supports" the amendment. He said busing was a "bankrupt idea [that violated] the cardinal rule of common sense," and that his opposition would make it easier for other liberals to follow suit. However, later in the same speech he had supported staunch integrationist Senator Edward Brooke's (R-MA) initiatives on housing, job opportunities and voting rights. Biden's support for the legislation was roundly criticized by civil rights organizations. Civil rights lawyer Jack Greenberg (director of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund who previously helped win the Brown v. Board of Education decision) said that the Bill "heaves a brick through the window of school integration", and said Biden was the man with his hand on the brick.

In 1975 Biden supported a resolution by Harry Byrd to restore the U.S. citizenship of Commander Robert E. Lee of the Confederate States Army. He also said praised segregationist George Wallace as "someone who's not afraid to stand up and offend people ... but would say what the American people know in their gut is right". Wallace at the time was best known for his his famous inaugural address: "Segregation now, segregation forever!" In 1987, during Biden's first presidential campaign, the Detroit Free Press and Philadelphia Inquirer said that when Biden was campaigning in Alabama he "talked of his sympathy for the South, bragged of an award he had received from George Wallace in 1973, and said 'we (Delawareans) were on the South's side in the Civil War'." When these comments resurfaced in 2019, a Biden spokesperson said: "As a young Senator, Joe Biden declared that if George Wallace — an unhinged, racist maniac — became the presidential nominee of his party, he would support Gerald Ford", but did not say whether the comments were made.

Biden supported a measure sponsored by former member of the Ku Klux Klan, Senator Robert Byrd (D-WV), that forbad the use of federal funds to transport students beyond the school closest to their homes. This was adopted as part of the Labor-HEW Appropriations Act of 1976. In 1977, Biden co-sponsored an amendment alongside Thomas Eagleton (D-MO) to close loopholes in Byrd's amendment, as HEW still continued to require busing. This was signed into law by the Carter administration in 1978. A 1977 status report on school desegregation by the federal Civil Rights Commission in Washington, D.C. opposed this measure, arguing that "the enactment of Eagleton-Biden would be an actual violation, on the part of the Federal Government, of the fifth amendment and Title VI" of the Civil Rights Act.

Biden's opposition to busing would later lead the Democratic Party to mostly abandon school desegregation policies.

1978 re-election

In 1978, when Biden was seeking re-election as Senator, when Wilmington's busing plan generated much turmoil. Biden's compromise solution between his white constituents at meetings and African-American leaders was to introduce legislation to outlaw the court's power to enforce certain types of busing, while allowing it to end segregation which had been deliberately imposed by school districts. White anti-integrationists seized onto a comment Biden made saying that he would support the use of federal helicopters if Wilmington's schools could not be voluntarily integrated, and Littleton P. Mitchell (head of the Delaware NAACP) later said that Biden "adequately represented our community for many years, but he quivered that one time on busing". This compromise nearly alienated him from both working-class whites and African-Americans, but tensions ended following the end of a teachers' strike which began over pay issues raised by the busing plan.

Friendship with segregationists

In 1988, Senator Biden praised Dixiecrat Senator John C. Stennis, signer of the Southern Manifesto, as "a man of character and courage". In 2003, Biden read an eulogy at the memorial service of former senator Strom Thurmond, calling Thurmond "a product of his time". Biden also admiringly noted a 1947 newspaper editorial which praised Thurmond's work with reading programs for black students at segregated schools. Biden's speech was praised for his supposed impartiality, but his comments in recent years garnered criticism. Vice President Biden, President Barack Obama and former President Bill Clinton honored former Exalted Cyclops of the KKK and longest-serving U.S. Senator Robert Byrd at his memorial service in 2010. In April 2019, Biden "gave a glowing eulogy at the funeral of his longtime friend" Ernest Hollings, a segregationist who raised the Confederate battle flag over the South Carolina state capitol in 1961 and described the NAACP as a communist front "against our way of life in the South" which was "both subversive and illegal".

While at a fundraiser on June 18, 2019, Biden said that one of his greatest strengths was "bringing people together", pointing to his relationships with segregationist senators James Eastland and Herman Talmadge. While imitating a Southern drawl, Biden remarked "I was in a caucus with James O. Eastland. He never called me 'boy,' he always called me 'son.'" Private correspondence later revealed by CNN showed that Biden repeatedly asked for, and received, Eastland's support on anti-busing measures in 1977, and wrote to him to "thank you again for your efforts in support of my bill to limit court ordered busing".

New Jersey Senator Cory Booker was one of many Democrats to criticize Biden for the remarks, issuing a statement that said "You don't joke about calling black men 'boys.' Men like James O. Eastland used words like that, and the racist policies that accompanied them, to perpetuate white supremacy and strip black Americans of our very humanity". In response, Biden said that he was not meaning to use the term "boy" in its derogatory racial context.

During the first Democratic presidential debate, Kamala Harris criticized Biden for his comments regarding his past work with the senators and his past anti-busing stance. Harris said that busing allowed black children like her to attend integrated schools. In response, Biden said he "did not oppose busing in America. What I opposed is busing ordered by the Department of Education", before giving a "rambling inventory of his civil-rights record" in defense. He later apologised to the African-American community for "for any pain and misconception" his comments inadvertently caused. Biden was widely criticized for his debate performance and support for him dropped 10 points. President Donald Trump defended Biden, saying Harris was given "too much credit" for her debate with Biden.

Further reading

• Gadsen, Brett (8 October 2012). Between North and South: Delaware, Desegregation, and the Myth of American Sectionalism. University of Pennsylvania Press. ISBN 978-0-8122-0797-2. Search this book on

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