Former Vice President Joe Biden, who has been emphasizing his civil rights record as he considers a 2020 White House bid, once praised notorious segregationist George Wallace and later claimed to have received an award from him.
“I think the Democratic Party could stand a liberal George Wallace — someone who’s not afraid to stand up and offend people, someone who wouldn’t pander but would say what the American people know in their gut is right,” Biden told the Philadelphia Enquirer on Oct. 12, 1975, referring to the racist then-Alabama governor.
During 1987 fundraising trips across the South for his unsuccessful 1988 presidential bid, he sought to appeal to white voters, telling audiences that he had received an award from Wallace in 1973 and that the segregationist had lauded him as “one of the outstanding young politicians of America.”
Last week, Biden, who could face at least two African-American opponents in the 2020 race for the presidency, told an audience in Fort Lauderdale that “I came out of the civil rights movement.” He has also stressed his closeness to “my buddy” Barack Obama, America’s first black president, who chose him as his vice presidential running mate in 2008 and 2012.
Wallace, an open segregationist who in later life apologized for his positions, famously punctuated his 1963 inaugural address with the rallying cry: “Segregation now, segregation forever!” He ran for president as a segregationist three times in 1964, 1968, and in 1972, when his campaign was cut short after he was shot and crippled in Laurel, Md.
Biden’s 1975 comments came on the heels of a legislative victory in the Senate, when he sponsored an amendment to prevent the federal government enforcing busing policies to desegregate school districts. Biden’s amendment appalled civil rights activists who claimed it set back desegregation efforts and struck down parts of the Civil Rights Act.
“The pro-busers and the civil rights lobby were dumbstruck … although I had put them on notice months earlier,” said Biden in the interview. “I think I’ve made it possible for liberals to come out of the closet … If [anti-busing] isn’t yet a respectable liberal position, it is no longer a racist one.”
The Washington Examiner reported last week that Biden embraced segregation in October 1975, the same month he said Democrats could do with “a liberal George Wallace,” stating that it was a matter of “black pride.”
Biden’s historical praise for Wallace is a marked contrast to his recent statements about the late Alabama politician. In October 2018, Biden lambasted President Trump for being like Wallace.
“No president has ever led by fear. Not Lincoln. Not Roosevelt. Not Kennedy. Not Reagan,” said Biden during a Democratic rally in Orlando, Fla. “This president [Trump] is more like George Wallace than George Washington!”
Biden stressed his anti-busing legislation while campaigning for white votes in Southern states for his campaign for the 1988 Democratic presidential nomination.
During a campaign trip to Alabama in 1987, he boasted about an award he supposedly received from Wallace in 1973 and claimed his state of Delaware supported the Confederacy during the Civil War. Delaware, a border state, fought on the Union side of the war.
The Detroit Free Press reported: “For Biden, the problem is that he has presented inconsistent images of himself at different times and places.” The article noted that Biden had said in 1983 that as a young man “my stomach turned upon hearing the voices of [Arkansas Gov. Orval] Faubus and [Alabama Gov. George] Wallace.
“But campaigning in Alabama last April, Biden talked of his sympathy for the South, bragged of an award he had received from George Wallace in 1973, and said “we (Delawareans) were on the South’s side in the Civil War.”
The Detroit Free Press article, dated Sept. 21, 1987, was written by Robert S. Boyd, the paper’s longtime Washington bureau chief, who received a Pulitzer Prize in 1972. Boyd, now 91, told the Washington Examiner that he attended the Alabama speech and recalled Biden expressing support for the South. But he said Biden “did not come off as racist.”
Boyd also reported, on May 1, 1987, that Biden liked to remind Southern audiences “that former Alabama Gov. George Wallace praised him as one of the outstanding young politicians of America.”
The Civil War comments are similar to remarks Biden made years later in December 2006 in South Carolina as the 2008 campaign, in which he again unsuccessfully ran, approached. Biden called Delaware a “slave state that fought beside the North. That’s only because we couldn’t figure out how to get to the South. There were a couple of states in the way.”
At other times, Biden was critical of Wallace, reacting angrily when a desegregation activist compared him to the Alabama governor during a Senate hearing in 1975.
Jeff Frederick, a history professor at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke who wrote the Wallace biography Stand Up for Alabama, said he has never heard of Biden receiving an award from Wallace.
“It doesn’t ring a bell,” he said, adding that such an award seems unlikely considering the political dynamics of the time. “It’s really hard to imagine that either of them were particularly excited about either getting or giving this award to each other,” said Frederick.
Frederick said Wallace had started to apologize for his segregationist stance by the 1980s and that by 1987 the Alabamian’s influence in national politics was already waning.
“At that point in time Wallace had clearly lost his fastball,” said Frederick. “The George Wallace of the ’60s and early ’70s was such a dynamic campaign presence that even when people completely disagreed with his message, they looked at the way that he could hold a crowd in the palm of his hands, and they sought to whatever extent that they were capable to emulate that.”
Biden spokesman Bill Russo did not respond to a request for comment.
