Joe Biden refused to apologize after his fellow 2020 contenders slammed him for invoking the names of two segregationist former senators as part of the former vice president's call for working with the opposition.

'Apologize for what?,' Biden said to reporters Wednesday night outside a fundraiser in Maryland.

'There's not a racist bone in my body. I've been involved in civil rights my whole career. Period,' he said.

Joe Biden said Cory Booker should apologize to him for doubting his record on race

And when asked about rival Cory Booker's call for him to apologize, Biden shot back it was the New Jersey senator who should apologize to him.

'Cory should apologize,' he said. 'He knows better.'

Several of Biden's rivals for the Democratic nomination called on him to apologize after the former vice president talked about working with the avowed segregationists in his early days in the Senate.

'They know better,' was Biden's response.

'Here's the deal: I could not have disagreed with Jim Eastland more. He was a segregationist. I ran for the United States Senate because I disagreed with the views of the segregationists,' Biden said. 'The point I'm making is, you don't have to agree. You don't have to like the people, in terms of their views. But you just simply make the case, and you beat them.'

Booker, the first African American senator from New Jersey, responded that Biden was deeply hurtful to the black community when he said one of the segregationist senators didn't call him 'boy.'

'The vice president said I should know better and this is what I know. As a black man in America, I know the deeply harmful and hurtful usage of the word "Boy" and how it was used to dehumanize and degrade,' Booker told CNN Wednesday night.

'I know that segregationists like the two people he was talking about through their laws and their language deeply wounded this nation and the present day manifestations of their work can still be seen in black and brown communities like the one I go home to. I know that somebody running for president of the United States, somebody running to be the leader of our party should know that using the word "Boy" in the way he did can cause hurt and pain and we need a presidential nominee and the leader of our party to be sensitive to that,' he said.

Cory Booker said he wouldn't apologize to Biden

“I know that I was raised to speak truth to power, and that I should never apologize for doing that, and Vice President Biden shouldn’t need this lesson,” Sen. @CoryBooker says after Biden defends his remarks about working with segregationist senators. https://t.co/AZIbTbVBxo pic.twitter.com/IajUhVZBGq — CNN (@CNN) June 20, 2019

'I know that I was raised to speak truth to power, and that I should never apologize for doing that, and Vice President Biden shouldn’t need this lesson,' Booker continued.

'This is deeply disappointing. We waited for him to apologize. He didn't,' Booker noted.

'He knows better. And at a time when Donald Trump never apologizes for anything and starts to create that kind of toxic sentiment that you never apologize, never apologize, never apologize. I know Joe Biden. He's better than this,' Booker concluded.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi refused to get drug into the melee on Thursday.

'Joe Biden seems to have tremendous support in the African American community,' she told reporters at the Capitol. 'But that is for them to decide.'

'I'm not going to go to that place,' she declared.

Biden, at a fundraiser in Maryland Wednesday night, stressed his civil rights record and work with the late Senator Ted Kennedy in the Senate.

Bide said Kennedy was 'the guy who got me on the Judiciary committee, we served from years and years. And we had to put up with the likes of like Jim Eastland and Hermy Talmadge and all those segregationists and all of that. And the fact of the matter is that we were able to do it because we were able to win - we were able to beat them on everything they stood for.'

'We, in fact, detested what they stood for in terms of segregation and all the rest. And because of Teddy letting me become chairman of the Judiciary Committee in 1982, when he moved on to take on Health and Human Services, we were able to do so much. We restored the Voting Rights Act, we did it, and over time we extended it by 25 years not just five years,' he added.

Biden told a story about how Senator James Eastland of Mississippi 'never called me boy, he always called me son'

Biden called Senator Herman E. Talmadge one of the 'meanest,' but also said there was some 'civility' in the Senate during earlier decades

Biden adviser Symone Sanders, a prominent African American strategist and community organizer, went on CNN Thursday afternoon to defend the former vice president.

‘I want to be clear, the vice president didn't embrace segregationists. He agrees that their views are repugnant and the language they had used and were using during that time is unacceptable and understands it's hurtful to millions of Americans,’ she said.

The controversy surrounding the Democratic frontrunner began when words leaked from a fundraiser Biden held at the Carlyle hotel in Manhattan on Tuesday night and gained traction on Wednesday, Juneteenth - the anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation that freed slaves during the Civil War.

Biden enjoys strong support from black voters.

A poll out earlier this month from the Black Economic Alliance, showed 67 per cent of black voters were enthusiastic about the former vice president's candidacy. Biden beat out prominent black candidates Booker and Kamala Harris.

The former vice president was talking about his commitment to work with Republicans and opposition figures - a subject he often invokes on the campaign trail - but then bizarrely stressed his time working with fellow Democrats who spent decades in the Senate fighting desegregation efforts.

'I was in a caucus with James O. Eastland,' Biden said of the Mississippi senator.

'He never called me boy, he always called me son,' Biden said, affecting a southern drawl, according to a pool reporter who was there.

Biden, who spent 36 years in the Senate representing Delaware, also brought up Georgia Sen. Herman Talmadge, who like Eastland promoted segregation and owned a plantation in his home state.

Kamala Harris (left) and Elizabeth Warren (right) disagreed with Biden's remarks

New York Mayor Bill de Blasio tweeted an image of his family and blasted Biden's comments

Biden referenced 'a guy like Herman Talmadge, one of the meanest guys I ever knew, you go down the list of all these guys. Well guess what? At least there was some civility. We got things done,' Biden said.

'We didn't agree on much of anything. We got things done. We got it finished. But today, you look at the other side and you're the enemy. Not the opposition, the enemy. We don't talk to each other anymore,' said Biden.

His Democratic rivals pounced.

Booker said it wasn't something to joke about.

'You don't joke about calling black men 'boys,' Booker said in a statement Wednesday, after Biden's comments at a New York hotel circulated.

'Men like James O. Eastland used words like that, and the racist policies that accompanied them, to perpetuate white supremacy and strip black Americans of our very humanity,' Booker continued.

'Vice President Biden's relationships with proud segregationists are not the model for how we make America a safer and more inclusive place for black people, and for everyone. I have to tell Vice President Biden, as someone I respect, that he is wrong for using his relationships with Eastland and Talmadge as examples of how to bring our country together,' Booker continued, before demanding an apology.

'And frankly, I'm disappointed that he hasn't issued an immediate apology for the pain his words are dredging up for many Americans. He should.'

Also pounding Biden was New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, a presidential candidate whose wife, Chirlane McCray, is African American.

In a tweet featuring a photo of his inter-racial family, de Blasio wrote: 'It's 2019 & @JoeBiden is longing for the good old days of 'civility' typified by James Eastland. Eastland thought my multiracial family should be illegal & that whites were entitled to 'the pursuit of dead n*ggers,' he wrote in the first of a pair of tweets.

'It's past time for apologies or evolution from @JoeBiden. He repeatedly demonstrates that he is out of step with the values of the modern Democratic Party,' de Blasio continued.

Harris said of Biden's remarks: 'It concerns me deeply. If those men had their way, I wouldn't be in the United States Senate.'

'I appreciate the importance of working with people and finding common ground, but to suggest that individuals who literally made it their lives' work to take America back on the issue of race is a real problem for me,' she added.

Senator Elizabeth Warren said she wouldn't criticize Biden but disagreed with his words.

'I'm not here to criticize other Democrats, but it's never OK to celebrate segregationists. Never,' she said.

Eastland was known as the 'Voice of the White South' during his time in the Senate and referred to African Americans as 'an inferior race.'

He opposed the integration of blacks in military service, the Civil Rights Act, and said the Supreme Court - with its landmark decision in Brown vs. Board of Education, which integrated public schools - destroyed the Constitution. He advised people: 'You are not obliged to obey the decisions of any court which are plainly fraudulent sociological considerations

Eastland lost his 1978 re-election bid and said he 'didn't regret a thing' in his public career.

Talmadge also opposed the Civil Rights Act and said schools should be closed rather than desegregated.

Joe Biden represented Delaware in the Senate for 36 years

He lost his re-election bid in 1980 after his wife testified against him in an investigation of his finances, which led to his censure in the Senate and, ultimately, his political down fall.

Coming to Biden's defense on Wednesday was Rep. James C. Clyburn of South Carolina, the highest-ranking African-American lawmaker in the U.S. House who is throwing his annual fish fry this coming weekend, drawing Biden and other presidential contenders.

Clyburn said his own work with the late South Carolina Sen. Strom Thurmond, who ran as a Dixiecrat in 1948 while promoting segregation and served in the Senate for decades, was 'similar to Biden working with Talmadge,' Politico reported.

Biden has previously stressed his ability to win votes across Delaware, a state with a mix of urban and rural populations and a complicated history on matters of race and civil rights.

He made the comments at his Tuesday fundraiser as a way to stress the need 'to reach consensus under our system' – but ended up pointing to one of the most divisive political struggles in the nation's history.

Earlier this week, speaking at the Poor People's Campaign, the former vice president spoke about his home state's racial history.

'But my son Beau, before he died he was the attorney general. We were the only two Caucasian guys who won downstate, as they say, and won overwhelmingly in the black community,' Biden said.

'We couldn't make up our mind, exactly, which side we wanted to be in the Civil War,' he said of a state with the nation's eighth largest black population that a history of slavery under the plantation system.

'With a lot of poor folks down there, those poor folks — what they call 'hanging chickens' in the chicken industry … most of them Caucasian,' he said, referencing farm jobs in Delaware.