by President Biden noted Sunday that he was involved in the civil rights movement 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 defining moment in the civil rights movement of the 1960s.
“I was a student in the north of the civil rights movement,” Biden told the crowd.
“I remember how guilty I was [that] I was not here. How could we all be up there and you’re going through what you’ve been through,” he continued.
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US President Joe Biden speaks at an event near the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, on Sunday, March 5, 2023.
But there is no historical evidence to support Biden’s claim. Sunday’s speech wasn’t the first time Biden has claimed involvement in the civil rights movement.
In 1983, Biden claimed he participated in desegregation sit-ins in public spaces.
“When I was 17, I took part in sit-ins to desegregate restaurants and movie theaters,” Biden said. “And my stomach churned when I heard the voices of Faubus and Wallace. My soul erupted when I saw Bull Connor and his dogs.”
Former Birmingham Public Safety Commissioner Theophilus “Bull” Connor was famous for using fire hoses and police K-9s against civil rights protesters.
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FILE PHOTO: U.S. President Joe Biden arrives to deliver 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 that Biden has ever participated in a sit-in. Since the 1980s, Biden has claimed he walked out of a restaurant as a high school student because a black student was not welcome there.
The former student later contradicted that claim, saying Biden and other white students were “unaware” of the situation.
“They didn’t know what happened,” 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. You didn’t notice until later.”
Biden’s latest attempt to solidify black voter support marks the 58th anniversary of “Bloody Sunday,” when white state troops attacked pro-suffrage protesters on Edmund Pettus Bridge. (Cheney Orr/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
In 1987, Biden acknowledged that he was “not an activist” in the 1960s, although he believed in the principles of the civil rights movement.
“In the ’60s, I was actually very concerned about the civil rights movement. I wasn’t an activist,” Biden said. “I worked at an all black swimming pool in east Wilmington, Delaware. I was involved in what they thought, what they felt.”
Last January he hinted that he had been arrested as a civil rights activist. He spoke on a campus shared by two historically black colleges: Morehouse College and Clark Atlanta University.
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“I have not followed in the footsteps of generations of students who have walked this campus. But I went to other terrains. Because I’m so freaking old, I was there too,” Biden told the crowd. “You think I’m kidding, man. It feels like yesterday when I was first arrested.
