Speaking of Joe Biden...

As Joe Biden campaigns in South Carolina, ahead of a primary contest later this month he must win to revive his hopes of becoming the Democratic nominee for president, the former vice president is facing questions over claims that he took part in the civil rights movement as a student in the 1960s.

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As [Shaun] King noted in his newsletter, during Biden’s first run for the presidency, in 1987, the then-senator frequently described himself as a teenage civil rights activist, only to withdraw those claims later. More than three decades later, having served under the first black president, Biden seems to have reversed himself again, and now describes himself as a participant in desegregation protests in his youth.

  The Intercept

I'd be very surprised if that were true.

In King’s account of Biden’s career, King [...] accuses him of lying to curry favor with black voters.

Biden’s campaign insists that the attack is unfounded, pointing to testimony from old friends who say that he took part in at least two protests against segregation as a young man: walking out of a diner in Wilmington, Delaware in 1961 that refused to serve a black classmate, and then picketing the segregated Rialto movie theater in 1962.

It would be hard to prove he didn't. But I remain skeptical.

In previous statements, Biden and a former Delaware state president of the NAACP who backs his account, Richard “Mouse” Smith, both claimed that they protested outside the Rialto in 1965. Smith told the Washington Post last year that picketing the Rialto in 1965 with him was Biden’s first civil rights protest. In an interview with The Intercept this week, Smith attributed his haziness about the dates to his present age, 71.

Bates said that the former vice president, who is now 77, had also mixed up the dates.

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Given the stakes involved — Biden told campaign donors in New York on Thursday that he is relying on South Carolina’s African American community to deliver him the win he needs to get back in the race against Sanders — it is worth tracing the contours of Biden’s claims as they have changed over the years.

The controversy began in 1987, when Biden launched his first bid for the presidency with a call for a return to the idealism of the ’60s — casting himself, at the age of 44, as a member of a generation that had changed America through its activism. That appeal was frequently punctuated by apparent recollections of his personal involvement in anti-segregation protests.

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“When I was 17 years old, like many of you, I participated in sit-ins to desegregate the restaurants and movie houses of Wilmington, Delaware.”

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“The way this country has always been moved to great things is by passion and commitment,” the candidate told students at St. Paul’s School in Concord. “When I marched in the civil rights movement, I did not march with a 12-point program; I marched with tens of thousands of others to change attitudes, and we changed attitudes.”

Biden’s aides tried, unsuccessfully, to nudge him back on script, reminding him that he had not, personally, marched, the journalist Richard Ben Cramer later reported in his 1992 book about the campaign, “What It Takes.” According to Cramer, Biden’s advisers later told him that the candidate would acknowledge the error each time he was reminded of it — and then frequently repeat it on the campaign trail.

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“I came out of the civil rights movement,” the candidate told supporters at a small gathering in Claremont, New Hampshire, in April 1987. “I was one of those guys that sat in and marched and all that stuff.”

But at a news conference in Washington that September, Biden seemed to retract all claims to have had a personal role in the civil rights movement. “During the 1960s, I was in fact very concerned about the civil rights movement,” Biden said. “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, what they were feeling. I was involved, 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.”

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A week later, on September 23, 1987, Biden dropped out of the race with his credibility in tatters, following the revelations that he had quoted, without attribution, a rousing autobiographical speech by the British Labour Leader Neil Kinnock at a debate in Iowa, and from Robert F. Kennedy during his address to the convention in California, and had been accused of plagiarism in law school.

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[N]owhere in [Biden’s memoir “Promises to Keep,” released in 2007] did Biden mention having actually participated in the civil rights movement as a student. He did describe what he learned about race from a summer job in 1962, when he was the only white lifeguard at a public pool in a predominantly black section of Wilmington. Over lunch, and during basketball games after work, Biden wrote, his black co-workers told him about the impact of racism on their lives.

No, they didn't.

“Sometimes,” Biden wrote, “my friends would tell me about being forced to sit in the balconies at the segregated movie theaters downtown.” Those conversations, Biden observed, reinforced the “dramatic lessons” he absorbed daily “about segregation and civil rights from newspapers and television.”

I'm not as old as Biden, and even in my Missouri teen life, blacks were always relegated to the balcony of the local theaters. Everybody knew it. Nobody talked about it. I remain skeptical

Given that the memoir describes his time in high school and college in detail, it seems odd that Biden failed to make any mention at all of what he now describes as formative experiences: the picketing of the segregated Rialto movie theater and attending civil rights organizing sessions at Rev. Otis Herring’s Union Baptist Church. Asked about the discrepancy, Bates, Biden’s spokesperson, argued that the book was written as something of a manifesto for his 2007 campaign and was not intended to be an exhaustive autobiography.

Whatever.

As Obama’s vice president, Biden referred on at least five occasions to having played some role in the civil rights movement.

In 2010, he told his biographer Jules Witcover that the movement had shaped his political consciousness. “I was always the kid in high school to get into arguments about civil rights,” Biden said in an interview. “I didn’t do any big deal, but I marched a couple of times to desegregate the movie theaters in downtown Wilmington.”

Witcover reported that Mike Fay, who played high school football with Biden, was present when the team decided to walk out of the Charcoal Pit, a Wilmington diner, when they discovered that their only black teammate, Frank Hutchins, was not allowed to sit with them in 1961. Fay did not recall whose idea it was to leave, but Biden cast himself in the leading role when he told a more dramatic version of the same story to a reporter from the Wilmington News Journal in 1982.

“I organized a civil rights boycott because they wouldn’t serve black kids. One of our football players was black, and we went there and they said they wouldn’t serve him. And I said to the others, ‘Hey, we can’t go in there.’ So we all left,” Biden told the newspaper. “It was very brief and not nasty. My clear intent was to boycott. I recall shortly after that they started serving black people.”

Boycott. Whatever. What else would anyone have done when one of their team wasn't allowed to sit with them?

Hutchins, who was the first black student to attend Archmere Academy in Claymont, Delaware, initially disputed Biden’s account of the incident, telling the Philadelphia Inquirer in September 1987 that he thought Biden was unaware that he had not been allowed into the restaurant. A few days later, Hutchins retracted those doubts, telling the Wilmington News Journal that Biden’s recollection was probably correct.

Somebody got to him.

Witcover’s biography of Biden makes no mention of him joining in any civil rights protests while he was a student at the University of Delaware, from 1961 to 1965, or in law school at Syracuse University, from 1965 to 1968.

But speaking at a 2012 Martin Luther King Jr. Day event at Girard College in Philadelphia, Biden said that in August of 1965, when King addressed a protest outside the gates of the school to demand its desegregation, he was in nearby Delaware, “smitten by Dr. King and working in my little way in the civil rights movement — in the segregated movie theaters in my state.”

Right.

“I was not with him outside the gates. I was outside the Rialto Theater in Wilmington, Delaware.”

In fact, the picketing of the segregated Rialto theater took place more than two years earlier, lasting from November 1962 until May 1, 1963, when the theater owner relented and agreed to admit black patrons. Delaware’s General Assembly outlawed segregation in public accommodations later that year, with the legislation being signed into law by Gov. Elbert Carvel on Dec. 18, 1963.

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In an address to the NAACP in the summer of 2012, Biden recalled sitting with Richard “Mouse” Smith, a former gang member who became the organization’s Delaware state president, in a black church “talking about desegregating the Rialto and the Queen movie theaters.”

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Smith said in an interview with The Intercept that he did take part in the picketing of the Rialto, even though he was only 13 years old when the campaign began, and that Biden also protested. Smith also said that he did attend discussions of civil rights at various black churches in Delaware with Biden, but it seems unlikely that any of those were about planning the picketing of the Rialto, since that campaign was led by a white clergyman.

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Since the Rialto protest was organized by a white Episcopal priest, and his campaign now says that this was the only civil rights protest Biden was involved in as a young man, there is no clear explanation of his repeated references to attending organizing meetings at black churches. It seems possible that Biden is conflating later visits to black churches, after he got involved in politics in the 1970s, with events that took place during the 1960s.

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[A]t the National Action Network’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day breakfast last year, Biden told another version of the same story. “In October, I was invited to the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis to receive the Freedom Award,” Biden said, “a thing, when I sat in black churches in the east side of Wilmington getting ready to — and by the way, next to two Jewish rabbis — getting ready to go out and desegregate movie theaters in Delaware, I never, ever thought in my life I would be worthy of and I’m still not sure I’m worthy of it.”

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Back in South Carolina, there are signs that Biden’s support among black voters, who make up about 60 percent of the Democratic electorate, is beginning to slip away.

On the heels of a new national poll that showed Biden dropping from the first choice of 49 percent of black voters last month to just 27 percent this month, following his poor showings in Iowa and New Hampshire, supporters of his rivals say that his support in South Carolina could crater before the state votes in two weeks. “Joe Biden wasn’t selected as a running mate for Barack Obama because he was a civil rights activist,” JA Moore, a state representative from Charleston, South Carolina, who attended a Biden event on Tuesday told the New York Times. “It was because he was a safe white choice.”

And that's true.

We get old. The past gets hazy. Joe may have done some protesting. He's also done some lying about it. We don't need another president who lies when he doesn't need to.

Say no to Joe.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.