Sit-ins, marches, boycotts of segregated movie theaters and restaurants. Searing memories of how "my soul raged upon seeing the dogs of Bull Connor" in Alabama. A dramatic tale of a walkout in support of a lone black fellow student.

It was all part of the decade Joe Biden, now 76, came of age — he turned 21 two days before President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963. By Biden's own account, he took a bold stance against racism and joined the civil rights activist movement during the turbulent 1960s.

This record of radical protest against racial injustice could be a powerful weapon against Kamala Harris, the California senator and 2020 Democratic rival who memorably took him to task in last week’s debate over his 1970s opposition to busing as a way to desegregate schools.

"I came out of the civil rights movement," Biden said at a book event in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., in February. Last Friday, he told wealthy donors at a San Francisco fundraiser: “I got involved in the civil rights movement as a kid."

As recently as 2014, Biden claimed at a Martin Luther King Day breakfast, "I got involved in desegregating movie theaters."

The problem is, there is no evidence that Biden had any involvement in the civil rights movement in the 1960s, beyond being a spectator as he went to college, became a lawyer, and ran for office, being elected to New Castle County Council in Delaware, the beginning of 46 uninterrupted years in public office.

His civil rights record now faces fresh scrutiny after his clash with Harris because he is using it as a shield in the 2020 Democratic race. “There's not a racist bone in my body,” he said angrily after being criticized last month for speaking wistfully about his friendships with segregationist senators. “I've been involved in civil rights my whole career.”

But other Democratic politicians of his vintage have much greater claims to civil rights activism. His 2020 Democratic rival Bernie Sanders, 77, was arrested in August 1963 in an anti-segregation protest in Chicago. The same year, Joe Lieberman, also 77, the 2000 Democratic vice presidential nominee, went to Mississippi to register black voters and participated in the March on Washington, led by Martin Luther King.

In 1965, Rep. John Lewis of Georgia, then a civil rights leader, was brutally beaten as he led 600 protesters in Selma, Ala., on what became known as "Bloody Sunday." Two years earlier, Eugene "Bull" Connor, Alabama's commissioner for public safety, had unleashed snarling dogs on civil rights demonstrators.

Biden told the Maine Democratic Conference in Augusta, Maine, in September 1983: "When I was 17 years old, I participated in sit-ins to desegregate restaurants and movie houses in my state, and my stomach turned upon hearing the voices of Faubus and Barnett, and my soul raged upon seeing the dogs of Bull Connor." He ended his speech by wiping tears from his eyes.

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Govs. Orval Faubus of Arkansas and Ross Barnett of Mississippi were notorious segregationists.

In the acclaimed 1992 book What It Takes by Richard Ben Cramer, an account of the 1988 presidential campaign, Biden is quoted as saying: "Folks, when I started in public life, in the civil rights movement, we marched to change attitudes ... I remember what galvanized me ... Bull Connor and his dogs ... I'm serious. In Selma."

But Biden never traveled to Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi, or any other Southern state, in that era.

Biden repeatedly claimed that he organized a boycott of a segregated restaurant and participated in sit-ins along U.S. Route 40 in 1961, a series of protests at segregated restaurants along the major highway in Delaware and Maryland. He also claimed he marched in civil rights protests, occupied a segregated movie theater, and led a high school boycott of a whites-only grill in Wilmington, Del.

He told the California Democratic Convention in February 1987: “When I was 17 years old, I participated in sit-ins to desegregate restaurants and movie houses of Wilmington, Del."

"We changed attitudes on race in this country," he said in May 1987. "We marched. We didn't march for a 14-point program to end segregation. We marched to change attitudes."

In April 1987, Biden said: "I came out of the civil rights movement. I was one of those guys that sat in and marched and all that stuff." In August 1987, the Chicago Tribune wrote that Biden had been a "civil rights activist who joined sit-ins in his youth at the segregated Towne Theater in Wilmington"

Multiple Biden newspaper profiles and interviews include similar claims. A 1975 Washington Post profile reported that Biden had “accumulated some very credible civil rights credentials since adolescence” by “participat[ing] in a high school restaurant boycott and in sit-ins along U.S. 40.” The Baltimore Sun interviewed Biden in 1986 and reported, “As a young man, he took part in sit-ins to desegregate restaurants along U.S. 40 in Delaware.”

A Morning News article in September 1975 said that Biden "joined in sit-ins to desegregate restaurants along U.S. 40 before he joined the Senate."

The planned sit-ins were known as the “Route 40 Project” and were organized by the Congress of Racial Equality activist group. They took place in the summer, fall, and winter of 1961 when Biden was an 18-year-old college freshman at the University of Delaware.

Civil rights activists in Wilmington and the University of Delaware while Biden was a student said they don’t recall him participating in any demonstrations. A historian who wrote a book about the Route 40 Project and the Freedom Riders movement said he was unaware of Biden’s involvement.

“I’ve never heard that,” said Raymond Arsenault, a southern history professor at the University of South Florida and author of Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice. Arsenault said Biden’s participation would have been notable at the time because as a teenager he would have been younger than most of the other activists involved. “Very few of the Route 40 people were that young.”

According to Arsenault, the Route 40 Project consisted of chapter members of the Congress of Racial Equality and tended to be seasoned and well-trained. “These are CORE people, both black and white. Most of them were serious activists. They were very disciplined, well-trained,” he said.

At the time, many of the restaurants in Maryland and Delaware along U.S. Route 40 would not serve black people, including diplomats from African countries who regularly drove between New York and Washington, D.C. The situation drew international attention and embarrassed the Kennedy administration, which worried that the negative publicity would hand the Soviet Union a propaganda victory in the Cold War, said Arsenault.

The Congress of Racial Equality, an activist group that organized the Freedom Rides, sensed an opportunity to make common cause with the Kennedy administration, which had previously been indifferent to the civil rights movement.

The group announced that it would hold a massive Freedom Ride and sit-ins at over a dozen restaurants along Route 40 on Nov. 11, 1961, unless the eateries agreed to voluntarily desegregate. Organizers vowed to bus in over 1,000 activists from CORE chapter groups and related student organizations throughout the east coast.

The proposed demonstration never took place. Many of the restaurants agreed to CORE’s terms, and the group declared victory and called off the protest while continuing to negotiate with the holdouts. That December, CORE deployed some of its activists to test whether the restaurants were complying, but the sit-ins were smaller in scale.

At the University of Delaware, where Biden was a freshman, a group called the Student Committee Against Discrimination was taking the lead on Route 40-related demonstrations. The student committee was so effective that President Kennedy’s office sent them a letter commending their work on the restaurant desegregation effort in November 1961.

One of the group’s leaders, Duane Nichols, a graduate student at the time, told the Washington Examiner that he compiled the list of segregated restaurants that CORE targeted along Route 40. He said he does not recall Biden participating in protest activities.

Nichols, who is white, said he and a black colleague drove the highway and tested dozens of roadside restaurants in a single weekend. They were refused service at 20 of them, and sent the list of segregated establishments to CORE organizers.

"We made up the list for the [activists] up in Brooklyn, N.Y., who were going to come down in buses,” said Nichols.

Nichols and six other student activists, four of whom were black, were jailed the following February when they staged a separate sit-in at the Hollywood Diner in Dover, Del. Their case was taken up by legendary civil rights lawyer Louis Redding and was the first major challenge to Delaware’s Innkeeper law that had allowed private businesses to refuse service for any reason.

Betsy Marston, another member of the Student Committee Against Discrimination at the University of Delaware, was also arrested at the Dover sit-in. She told the Washington Examiner that she does not remember Biden being involved in campus activism.

“He wasn’t in our group,” she said. “Maybe wanted to be involved? I don’t know. It seems far-fetched, but you never know.”

Marston said the Student Committee Against Discrimination faced a lot of animosity on campus after they were arrested in Dover. “We had embarrassed the university, that was clear,” she said. “We were definitely radicals … and made people uncomfortable … there were some graduate students who befriended me, but, on the whole, it was not a popular thing to do.”

The group initially declined to post bail money, but Marston said local black churches took up a collection and they were released the next day. In 1963, a judge acquitted them of trespassing charges and ruled that it was unconstitutional for the government to enforce racial discrimination policies enacted by private businesses under the Innkeeper’s Law.

“I think it shaped my life to a large degree,” Marston said of her civil rights activism. “Certainly I was against the war in Vietnam, and marched, and I participated in trying to end the war. It made me, I guess involved in the issues of my time … I think it made me aware of the need to fight injustice.”

In multiple interviews in the 1970s and 1980s, Biden said he walked out and organized a boycott of the Charcoal Pit in Wilmington when the restaurant refused to serve one of his high school football teammates, who was black.

"That’s the only negative memory I have,” Biden said in a 1982 Sunday News Journal article. “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.”

“It was very brief and not nasty. My clear intent was to boycott. I recall shortly after that they started serving black people,” said Biden.

That story conflicted with the memory of the black student, Francis Hutchins, Jr., now a retired doctor living in Naples, Fla. Hutchins told the Philadelphia Inquirer in 1987 that he left the restaurant without telling the rest of the football players what happened and Biden didn’t find out about it until later.

“They weren’t aware of what happened,” Hutchins said. “I was only 16 then. It was my problem and my battle for me to work out. They were oblivious to it until later.”

Hutchins later contacted the newspaper to clarify that Biden did not witness the Charcoal Pit incident but could have confused it with other racial incidents at different restaurants. Hutchins did not respond to requests for comment from the Washington Examiner.

'When he pulled out of the 1988 presidential race in October 1987, Biden apologized for plagiarizing speeches by the British Labour leader Neil Kinnock and Robert F. Kennedy and from law journals when he was at Syracuse University. But he also tried to clean up his fabrications about his civil rights record.

"During the 1960s, I was in fact very concerned about the civil rights movement. I was not an activist. I worked at an all-black swimming pool in the east side of Wilmington, Del.," he said. "I was involved in what they were thinking, what they were feeling. 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."

Since then, Biden's outright fabrications appear to have been largely eliminated, though his 2014 claim to have been involved in "desegregating movie theaters" appears to be untrue. Instead, he has used exaggerations and broad formulations about the civil rights movement to suggest falsely it was an important part of his early career.

Biden did, however, strike a note of unusual candor when he finally visited Selma as vice president in 2013. He told the crowd, which included Rep. John Lewis: "I regret, and although it's not a part of what I'm supposed to say, I apologize it took me 48 years to get here. I should have been here. It's one of the regrets that I have and many in my generation have."

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