Biden’s tough talk on 1970s school desegregation plan could get new scrutiny in today’s Democratic Party. The potential 2020 White House contender wins praise from civil rights activists, but a little-known interview shows the challenges of a long record.
Sen. Joe Biden is pictured in December 1972, a month after he was elected to the Senate. By Matt Viser Matt Viser National political reporter Email Bio Follow March 7 at 1:25 PM When Joe Biden was a freshman senator in the mid-1970s, his home state of Delaware, like other hotspots across the country, was engulfed in a bitter battle over school busing, debating whether children should be sent to schools in different neighborhoods to promote racial diversity.
But Biden and civil rights leaders also have occasionally parted ways, and his career probably would be viewed through a new lens if he decides to run for president in a Democratic Party that has moved to the left and grown more ethnically diverse, even in the years since he was elected vice president.
Biden, 76, declined to be interviewed for this article. But his spokesman, Bill Russo, said the former vice president still believes he was right to oppose busing. Biden’s office provided a statement from Ralph G. Neas, former executive director of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, who said: “We disagreed on busing . . . but I always looked to Biden as a leader in the field of civil rights in other critical areas.”
Biden tells the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on July 23, 1986, that U.S. policy toward South Africa amounted to a shameful lack of backbone. Although civil rights leaders may object to Biden’s past statements about busing, his decision to stand by his views on the issue illustrate what some of his supporters think would be his advantage in the 2020 field: his ability to appeal beyond the Democratic base to some working-class white voters who voted for Donald Trump in 2016.
In the interview, Biden dismissed government efforts to impose diversity in schools. “We’ve lost our bearings since the 1954 Brown vs. School Board desegregation case,” he said. “To ‘desegregate’ is different than to ‘integrate.’ . . . I am philosophically opposed to quota systems. They insure mediocrity.”“The new integration plans being offered are really just quota systems to assure a certain number of blacks, Chicanos, or whatever in each school.
Against that backdrop, Biden, a rising political star, took aim at a 1974 court order directing Delaware to submit plans for desegregating Wilmington-area schools — an edict that was highly unpopular with many of his constituents. Jeffrey A. Raffel, who was executive director of the Delaware Committee on the School Decision in the 1970s, said it was hard for any political leader in the state to be pro-busing at the time, given the public passions against it.
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