Biden speaks peace and love but racial tensions and relations are at an all time low and everything is very tribal
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That said, the name I can't type or say, was known for extrememe, some might say racist/segregationist commentary.
Joe Biden helped give America the language that is still used to oppose school integration today, legislative and education history experts say.
In a 1975 Senate hearing, the legendary civil rights lawyer Jack Greenberg had something to say to freshman Sen. Joe Biden.
Greenberg, longtime director of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, took Biden to task for sponsoring a bill that would limit the power of courts to order school desegregation with busing. It was a move that followed the wishes of many of Biden's white constituents in Delaware.
The bill "heaves a brick through the window of school integration," said Greenberg, one of the lawyers who had won the Brown v. Board of Education case that ended legal school segregation 21 years earlier. And according to Greenberg, Biden was the man with his hand on the brick.
Biden's role in fighting student busing more than four decades ago has received renewed attention after the 76-year-old presidential candidate touted his ability to compromise with segregationists during his long Senate career. Biden said he disagreed strongly with these Southerners' views but needed to work with them to get things done. Biden's comments set off a firestorm among his political rivals and some political analysts, who described his language as offensive and anachronistic.
But political experts and education policy researchers say Biden, a supporter of civil rights in other arenas, did not simply compromise with segregationists — he also led the charge on an issue that kept black students away from the classrooms of white students. His legislative work against school integration advanced a more palatable version of the "separate but equal" doctrine and undermined the nation's short-lived effort at educational equality, legislative and education history experts say.
"Biden, who I think has been good overall on civil rights, was a leader on anti-busing," Rucker Johnson, author of the book "Children of the Dream: Why School Integration Works," said. "A leader on giving America the language to oppose it despite it being the most effective means of school integration at that time."
That, of course, is not how Biden sees it.
On Saturday, Biden defended his work with segregationist senators in an
interview with the Rev. Al Sharpton on MSNBC: "You got to deal with what's in front of you and what was in front of you was a bunch of racists and we had to defeat them."
After this article was originally published, Biden's national press secretary, Jamal Brown, emailed a statement saying that Biden was never opposed to integration, and in fact supported the concept. But he said Biden opposed Delaware's busing methods, and included statements from black activists in Delaware who also opposed busing.
In March, Biden's spokesman, Bill Russo, said the former vice president believes he was right to oppose busing.
"He never thought busing was the best way to integrate schools in Delaware — a position which most people now agree with," Russo
told The Washington Post in March. "As he said during those many years of debate, busing would not achieve equal opportunity. And it didn't."
In 1975, Biden was representing a state where one of the first major urban school desegregation plans had been ordered by a court. Many white parents in the Wilmington area were angry. In response, Biden sponsored not just the bill limiting courts' power but also an
amendment to an appropriations bill that barred the federal government from withholding funding from schools that remained effectively segregated.
The amendment went beyond the busing issue, affecting school systems that effectively separated students by race whether or not they used busing. Co-sponsors included segregationist Sens. Jesse Helms, R-N.C., and Strom Thurmond, R-S.C. The amendment passed the Senate on a 50-43 vote, including majorities of both Democrats and Republicans. (Biden was not alone among northern Democrats who supported it — in that group, 14 supported the amendment and 26 opposed it, according to the Congressional Quarterly.)
When Biden rose to defend the amendment, he said that the "assignment of schools and/or classes because of a person's race ... is a counterproductive concept that is causing more harm to equal education than any benefit."
Biden's anti-integration efforts didn't end in 1975. Two years later, he co-authored a bill that barred federal courts from ordering busing plans unless courts found evidence of discriminatory intent. That legislation failed.
A 1977 report on school desegregation by the Civil Rights Commission, a federal agency, described Biden's activities as stymieing school integration.
Federal data
analyzed by Johnson and other researchers shows that busing succeeded in narrowing racial achievement gaps before
frontal assaults and legislative maneuvers by Biden and others rendered it easier for districts under court order to be released from integration demands. America's school integration efforts lasted, all told, no more than 15 years, Johnson said.
Johnson has reviewed data on more than 10,000 students from this period, who were studied for decades afterward. He found that black adults who spent the most time in integrated schools attained more education, completed college, maintained better health and earned higher incomes than peers who spent less time or no time in integrated schools. All of this happened without any reduction in white student grades or outcomes, the data shows. And white adults who attended integrated schools reported better understanding of issues affecting nonwhite Americans.
"Integration is a social good which also happens to make for high-quality education," said Johnson, an economist and professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley. "It is also the one thing that has worked but the one thing most people don't want to talk about and many people fight if we even try."
Biden was particularly effective in fighting integration because he did not use the overtly racist language of the segregationists, who warned of race mixing and black inferiority, Johnson said. Instead, Biden, along with other centrists and liberals, talked about "forced busing," "local control" and "parents' rights."
At the time, Biden said the solution was not busing but creating better schools everywhere,
something the country has failed to accomplish.
That idea has shown up all over the country in recent years, in school assignment fights from
Brooklyn to
Birmingham. It is dressed up but essentially an argument for separate but equal schools, Johnson said.
Apart from the busing issue, Biden developed
a legislative history in other areas key to black Americans over his decades in the Senate. It includes support for fair housing, employment and voting rights, as well as
credit and lending equality and opposition to the apartheid in South Africa.
Today, Biden has an army of
defenders in the
Congressional Black Caucus and in Democratic political circles.
Former Rep. Lee Hamilton, D-Ind., described Biden as an inclusive, energetic supporter of civil rights — and said the busing issue was an exception.
"He disappointed, if you would, mainstream progressive Democrats, including me, and yet I considered him an ally in most fights and was always glad to have him on my side," Hamilton said.
But to critics, Biden's cozy familiarity with deal-making among white men does not pair well with the often uncomfortable, sometimes disruptive, work of creating equality.
"Is this the model of politics and government that he's operating in today?" said Brenda Carter, director of the Reflective Democracy Campaign, which aims to change the demographics of political power.
These critics want to know whether Biden would be an ally in this fight for equality. While
children of color comprise the majority of students in public K-12 classrooms,
most attend low-quality, highly segregated schools.
"For those of us who didn't have any power and had no seat at the bargaining table, this is part of the reason we are so deeply in need of bodacious, radical reforms today," said LaTosha Brown, co-founder of Black Voters Matter, which advocates for expanded voting access.
Biden's use of "not segregationists but avowed racists as a reference point for how you work across the aisle," she said, "begs the question of literally who is he trying to appeal to."
Joe Biden helped give America the language that is still used to oppose school integration today, legislative and education history experts say.
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A Fiery Speech, Heard Across The Nation
All of the major news networks covered Wallace's inaugural address on national television that day. And Wallace, Carter says, decided to "milk that for everything that he can."
The late Wayne Greenhaw, a newspaper reporter in Montgomery at the time, made a similar observation. "He was putting on a show. He marched back and forth, shook his fist," Greenhaw recalled shortly before his death in 2011. "He was promising that he would stand alone for the Southern cause and the cause of the white people."
Wallace's speech — and its delivery — was "vehement ... mean spirited ... hateful. It's like a rattlesnake was hissing it, almost," Greenhaw said.
"Let us send this message back to Washington, via the representatives who are here with us today," Wallace told the crowd. "From this day, we are standing up, and the heel of tyranny does not fit the neck of an upright man.
"Let us rise to the call of freedom-loving blood that is in us, and send our answer to the tyranny that clanks its chains upon the South," Wallace declared from the podium. "In the name of the greatest people that have ever trod this earth, I draw a line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny, and I say, segregation now, segregation tomorrow and segregation forever."
Poe, the former NAACP chapter president, says he and his colleagues were taken aback. "To hear the governor of a state get up and make the kind of comments that you would expect that someone in the back alley, with their sheets on and burning crosses would make — that was the thing that really caught us."
'Words Can Be Dangerous'
Poe says Wallace was determined to continue to exercise states' rights — and to continue to segregate — "no matter what the Supreme Court said in
Brown v. Board of Education, no matter what the federal government [was] saying."
Reflecting on his response to the speech at the time, Rep. John Lewis, a Georgia Democrat, originally from Alabama, says he took Wallace's words personally. "My governor, this elected official, was saying in effect, you are not welcome, you are not welcome," Lewis says.
"Words can be very powerful. Words can be dangerous," Lewis says. "Gov. Wallace never pulled a trigger. He never fired a gun. But in his speech, he created the environment for others to pull the trigger, in the days, the weeks and months to come."
Indeed, violence quickly followed Wallace's inauguration, says Poe. "We began to feel the sting of the speech. People night-riding and burning crosses. The police beat down people and ran over them with horses, put tear gas on them."
And later that year, four girls were killed in the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Alabama.
"This was a very a difficult time in the American South," Lewis says.
"Segregation now, segregation forever" quickly became Wallace's symbol, Greenhaw recalled. "Before Wallace made that speech, the editorial page editor of the
Montgomery Advertiser tried to get Wallace to take out that part" of the speech. "And Wallace said, 'Without that, it won't stand up.'
"Much later in life, he probably wished he had taken it out," Greenhaw said.
'He Wanted People To Forgive Him'
While George Wallace was elected Alabama's governor three more times and made four runs for president, he would never hold national office. Carter says Wallace's inaugural address ensured he could never become president.
"Most Americans — what they know about George Wallace is, 'Segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever,' " Carter says. "That line is so iconic, so important. And George Wallace was on the wrong side of history."
Wallace himself became a victim of violence on May 15, 1972, while campaigning for president in Maryland. He was shot five times as he stepped out from behind a bulletproof podium. One of the bullets badly damaged his spinal cord, leaving him paralyzed.
"One has to wonder if, sitting in that wheelchair, maybe he had a chance to contemplate," Poe says of Wallace's years after the shooting.
Some years later, after Lewis had been elected to Congress, he heard from Wallace. "He said, 'John Lewis, will you come by and talk with me?'
"And I remember the occasion so well," Lewis says. "It was like someone confessing to their priest or to a minister. He wanted people to forgive him. He said to me, 'I never hated anybody; I never hated any black people.'
"He said, 'Mr. Lewis, I'm sorry.' And I said, 'Well, governor, I accept your apology.' "
Poe was also able to reach the same conclusion. "Being the type of person I am, out of my heart and soul, I can forgive George Wallace. Yes. Heaven's sakes, I forgive him," Poe says. "But forget? No. Never."
Even today, Lewis says he often reflects on the governor's speech.
"Does it hurt me? No," Lewis says. "In the end, I think George Wallace was one of the signs on this long journey towards the creation of a better America, toward the creation of a more perfect union. It was just one of the stumbling blocks along the way."
In his later years, Wallace reached out to civil rights activists and appeared in black churches to ask forgiveness. In his last election as governor of Alabama, in 1982, he won with more than 90 percent of the black vote. Wallace died in September 1998.
