By The FirstPresident Joe Biden is drawing fire for once again lying about having been actively involved in the U.S. civil rights movement–a long debunked claim that Biden himself has admitted is false. Biden made the claim during a speech in Alabama on Sunday.
Watch Biden’s statement below:
“I was a student up north in the civil rights movement,” Biden said to the crowd in Selma.
“I remember feeling how guilty I was, [that] I wasn’t here. How could we all be up there, and you going through what you went through,” the President added.
Biden has a long history of making false claims about his involvement in the civil rights movement. Biden conceded that he was “not an activist” during his failed 1987 presidential campaign. “During the ’60s, I was, in fact, very concerned about the civil rights movement. I was not an activist,” Biden said at the time.
However, in addition to his frequent lies about past civil rights activity, Biden actively worked against civil rights legislation while he was a member of the U.S. Senate. For example, Biden publicly opposed school desegregation busing, calling it “an asinine policy.” During the Democratic Presidential Primaries in in 2019, then-Senator Kamala Harris even called Biden out on his sketchy civil rights history.
“You also worked with [those segregationist senators] to oppose busing,” Harris said to Biden. “And there was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools and she was bused to school every day. And that little girl was me.”
For your convenience, here’s a handy compilation of 20 previous times that Joe Biden has lied about being a civil rights activist.
