President Joe Biden has again exaggerated his actions during the civil rights movement of the 1960s.
During a White House ceremony Tuesday, Biden boasted about his legacy of civil rights advocacy to a mostly Black crowd in attendance to witness the establishment of a national monument to Emmet Till, whose 1955 murder sparked the civil rights movement.
"Telling the truth and the full history of our nation is important. … It was a lesson I learned coming out of the — not like real leaders in the civil rights movement — but when I came out of the civil rights movement as a kid, as a public defender," Biden said.
In 1987, Biden acknowledged that he was not engaged in the civil rights movement and never marched for equality, The Washington Times reported.
"During the 1960s, I was, in fact, very concerned about the civil rights movement," Biden said during his 1988 presidential run, the Times reported. "I was not an activist. I worked at an all-Black swimming pool in the east side of Wilmington, Delaware. I was involved in what they were thinking, in what they were feeling.
"But I was not out marching. I was not down in Selma. I was not anywhere else. I was a suburbanite kid who got a dose of exposure to what was happening to black Americans in my own city."
Also in 1987, the Miami Herald reported that Biden was not a civil rights "activist." "I was a middle-class kid in a sports coat," he said, according to the Herald story.
Nevertheless, Biden has claimed his actions showed solidarity with Blacks. In September he said he was "very engaged" with the civil rights movement.
"I got very engaged — in my case — in the civil rights movement," Biden said in Pennsylvania on Labor Day. "As a kid, I worked a lot in the movement."
In 2021, Biden said he "came out of the civil rights movement."
In 2020, then-candidate Biden told the NAACP that he was involved in desegregating restaurants, though there's no evidence he worked to do that, the Times reported.
Biden also has said repeatedly that he was arrested during a civil rights demonstration.
"I did not walk in the shoes of generations of students who walked these grounds, but I walked other grounds," Biden said at Morehouse College and Clark Atlanta University, a historically Black college and university. "Because I'm so damn old, I was there as well."
"You think I'm kidding? It seems like yesterday was the first time I got arrested."
Biden admitted in 2020 that he had not been arrested.
"I wasn't arrested, I was stopped. I was not able to move where I wanted to go," Biden told CNN.
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