President Biden spoke to Black leaders Friday on the 70th anniversary of the 1954 Supreme Court ruling that desegregated schools but was called out online for his past actions in the fight against school desegregation.
Biden spoke at the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington about Brown v. Board of Education, which found that separation of schools by race was unconstitutional.
“The work of building a democracy … worthy of our dreams starts with opening the doors of opportunity for everyone, without exception,” he said.
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Despite his remarks and his advocacy for affirmative action programs, Biden was called out for his past remarks his critics say were racist.
“Remember when joe biden said segregation (sic) would turn schools into racial jungles,” one user on X wrote.
“Too bad Joe Biden kept fighting FOR Segregation (sic) decades after this wonderful decision,” another wrote.
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“Biden had spoken out, in public, in favor of segregation,” stated another.
The president was once a primary figure in the fight against school desegregation. His 2020 Democratic presidential opponents, including Vice President Kamala Harris, used it to attack his position on race.
“You also worked with them to oppose bussing,” Harris told Biden during a 2019 debate. “You know there was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate public schools, and she was bussed to school every day. And that little girl was me.”
In a 1975 Senate hearing, then-NAACP Legal Defense Fund Director Jack Greenberg criticized Biden for sponsoring a bill limiting the court’s power to use buses to desegregate schools. He said the legislation “heaves a brick through the window of school integration.”
That year, a Delaware newspaper quoted Biden as saying he didn’t “buy the concept” that Black people have been oppressed for hundreds of years.
“I do not buy the concept, popular in the ’60s, which said, ‘We have suppressed the Black man for 300 years, and the White man is now far ahead in the race for everything our society offers,” Biden was quoted as saying. “In order to even the score, we must now give the Black man a head start, or even hold the White man back, to even the race. I don’t buy that.”
Biden has also been criticized in the past for remarks about segregationists and KKK members. He previously eulogized late West Virginia Democratic Sen. Robert Byrd, a former KKK member who later regretted that affiliation and described it as a mistake, and Strom Thurmond, the former South Carolina senator and “Dixiecrat” presidential candidate who supported segregation.
Biden called Thurmond a “brave man, who, in the end, made his choice and moved to the good side.” In 2019, he refused to apologize for his remarks.
“Apologize for what?” Biden told reporters. “Not a racist bone in my body. I’ve been involved in civil rights my whole career. Period. Period. Period.”
Fox News Digital’s Joe Schoffstall and Alex Pappas contributed to this report.
