President Biden noted his involvement in the civil rights movement on Sunday during a speech in Selma, Alabama — a claim that remains unproven.
The president visited the historic city to commemorate the 58th anniversary of the “Bloody Sunday” march, a pivotal moment in the civil rights movement of the 1960s.
“I was a student up north in the civil rights movement,” Biden told the crowd.
“I remember feeling how guilty I was, (that) I wasn’t here. How could we all be up there and you go through what you went through,” he continued.
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US President Joe Biden speaks at an event near the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, USA on Sunday, March 5, 2023.
But there is no historical evidence to support Biden’s claim. Sunday’s speech was not the first time Biden has claimed involvement in the civil rights movement.
In 1983, Biden claimed he participated in sit-in protests to desegregate public spaces.
“When I was 17, I joined sit-ins to desegregate restaurants and movie theaters,” Biden said. And my stomach turned at the voices of Faubus and Wallace. My soul raged when I saw Bull Connor and his dogs.’
Former Birmingham Public Safety Commissioner Theophilus “Bull” Connor was known for using police fire hoses and K-9s against civil rights protesters.
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FILE PHOTO: U.S. President Joe Biden arrives to make remarks on voting rights during a speech on the grounds of Morehouse College and Clark Atlanta University in Atlanta, Georgia, U.S., January 11, 2022. (REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst/File Photo)
It doesn’t appear Biden has ever taken part in a sit-in. Since the 1980s, Biden has claimed that as a high school student he walked out of a restaurant because a black student was not welcome there.
The former student later contradicted that claim, saying Biden and other white students were “oblivious” to the situation.
“They didn’t know what was happening,” Frank Hutchins told the Philadelphia Inquirer in 1987. “I was only 16 at the time. It was my problem and my struggle for me to train. They didn’t realize it until later.”
Biden’s latest effort to bolster black voter support marks the 58th anniversary of “Bloody Sunday,” when white state troopers attacked voting-enfranchised protesters at Edmund Pettus Bridge. (Cheney Orr/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
In 1987, Biden admitted that he was “not an activist” in the 1960s, despite believing in the principles of the civil rights movement.
“In the 1960s, I was actually very concerned about the civil rights movement. I was not an activist,” Biden explains. “I worked at an all-black pool in the east side of Wilmington, Delaware. I was involved with what they thought, with what they felt.”
Last January, he suggested he was arrested for being a civil rights activist. He was speaking on a campus shared by two historically black colleges: Morehouse College and Clark Atlanta University.
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“I haven’t been in the shoes of generations of students who walked in this field. But I walked in other fields. Because I’m so damn old, I was there too,” Biden said. told the crowd. “You think I’m kidding, man. Seems like yesterday I was first arrested. Anyway.’