Joe Biden on Friday walked back his claim that he was arrested in South Africa in the 1970s during a trip to visit anti-apartheid leader Nelson Mandela, according to a report.

The former vice president has repeatedly claimed on the campaign trail that he was arrested during the trip, using the narrative as part of his efforts to win the support of African Americans before the South Carolina primary.

“When I said arrested, I meant I was not able to, I was not able to move. Cops, Afrikaaners, were not letting me go with them, made me stay where I was,” Biden said in a Friday interview on CNN.

“I guess I wasn’t arrested, I was stopped. I was not able to move where I wanted to go,” he said about his trip, when he traveled with members of the Congressional Black Caucus.

Biden said he was separated from the group at the airport.

“They had me get off a plane — the Afrikaaners got on in the short pants and their guns. Led me off first and moved me in a direction totally different,” he told CNN.

“I turned around and everybody, the entire black delegation, was going another way. I said, ‘I’m not going to go in that door that says ‘White only.’ I’m going with them.’ They said, ‘You’re not, you can’t move, you can’t go with them.’ And they kept me there until finally I decided that it was clear I wasn’t going to move,” Biden added.

“And so what they finally did, they said OK, they’re not going to make the congressional delegation go through the black door, they’re not going to make me go through the white door,” he said.

During his launch party in Columbia, South Carolina, this month, Biden said: “I had the great honor of being arrested with our UN ambassador on the streets of Soweto trying to get to see (Mandela) on (Robben) Island.”

He repeated the claim at least two other times, including when recounting a story about trying to get his future wife, Jill, to marry him.

During a Feb. 16 event in Nevada, Biden said that as president of South Africa, Mandela visited him in Washington.

“He threw his arms around me and said, ‘I want to say thank you.’ I said, ‘What are you thanking me for, Mr. President?’ He said, ‘You tried to see me. You got arrested trying to see me,'” Biden said.