Eastland and Talmadge were arch-segregationists, vicious racists and ardent defenders of white supremacy. Their long careers in politics were built on the systematic disenfranchisement of black Americans.

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Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey, one of two African-American candidates for the Democratic nomination, issued a swift response. “Vice President Biden’s relationships with proud segregationists are the not the model of how we make America a safer and more inclusive place for black people, and for everyone.” The other African-American candidate in the presidential race, Senator Kamala Harris of California, when asked about Biden’s remarks at the Capitol, gave a brief comment. “Yes, it concerns me deeply. If those men had their way, I wouldn’t be in the United States Senate and on this elevator right now.” The next week, Harris faced Biden onstage with eight other candidates. There, she went beyond “concern”:

It was hurtful to hear you talk about the reputations of two United States senators who built their reputations and career on segregation of race in this country. And it was not only that, but you also worked with them to oppose busing. And you know, there was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools and she was bussed to school every day and that little girl was me.

Biden was flustered, caught off-guard by this unexpected expression of lived experience. “Busing” helped a young Harris get a quality education at an integrated school. And while the city of Berkeley’s program was voluntary, her story isn’t unique. Imposed almost 20 years after Brown v. Board of Education, court-mandated desegregation gave a generation of black children unprecedented access to quality public schools.

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Biden wasn’t just criticized for his nostalgia play. He was confronted with the fact that his efforts as a young senator would have ended one of the country’s few attempts to make equal treatment a reality, to give black students the kind of education that white students took for granted. And while it’s tempting to portray this as ancient history, it isn’t. Harris was born in 1964, just three months after President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act. Biden joined the Senate in 1973. It was 1977 when Biden introduced a bill that would, in his words, “strike at the injustice of court-ordered busing.”

There was a backlash to Harris’s comments, most of it centered on decorum. By this line of reasoning, it was unfair of Harris to bring up her experiences, to make race part of the conversation, to put Biden on trial for past positions and make more ordinary Americans feel guilty about their views on this or any other race-inflected issue. Biden, too, had a response, invoking his work with President Obama: “I know and you know, I fought my heart out to ensure that civil rights and voting rights, equal rights are enforced everywhere,” Biden told Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow PUSH Coalition convention the day after the debate.