Biden repeats questionable claim he went to a black church every morning in ... trends now
President Joe Biden repeated during remarks honoring Martin Luther King Jr. on Sunday his questionable claim that he frequented a black church during the civil rights movement.
Biden would often say when speaking with minority voters during the 2020 presidential campaign that he attended a black church when he was a teenager, but members of that church in Wilmington, Delaware do not recall him ever attending.
Speaking at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia on Sunday, Biden honored slain civil rights icon Dr. King on his 94th birthday. Biden is the first sitting commander-in-chief to deliver a Sunday sermon at the church King once co-led.
'Let's lay one thing to rest,' Biden said at one point during his remarks. 'I may be a practicing Catholic, but [I] used to go to 7:30 Mass every morning in high school and then in college before I went to the Black church.'
'Not a joke, Andy knows this,' the president insisted, referencing former U.N. ambassador and former Southern Christian Leadership Conference executive director Andrew Young, who was in attendance.
President Joe Biden repeated during Sunday remarks his questionable claim that he attended a black church every day as a teenager. Pictured: Biden speaks at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia on Sunday honoring slain civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on his 94th birthday
'Andy, it's so great to see you, man,' Biden continued. 'You're one of the greatest we've ever had. Andy and I took on apartheid in South Africa and a whole lot else. They didn't want to see him coming. But we used to – that's when we would organize to march and to desegregate the city.'
Biden condemned 'racism, extremism, insurrection' during remarks Sunday in Atlanta.
The president also pressed on the importance of democracy several times and lamented the 'collapse' of 'institutional structures' in the U.S.
Biden served as vice president for eight years under Barack Obama, the first-ever black U.S. President. He took a four year break when Donald Trump served as president, then reemerged to run against him for president.
The black voting bloc was significant in helping him win the 2020 presidential contest against Donald Trump.
During a speech in 2019, Biden told Jesse Jackson's Rainbow PUSH coalition: 'I got raised in a black church.'
'We would go sit in Reverend Herring's church, sit there before we'd go out, and try to change things when I was a kid in college and in high school,' he added, referencing the prominent African-American Union Baptist Church in Wilmington.
Interviews with long-time church members, however, raised questions over Biden's account.
Some claim that while Biden befriended Rev. Herring as an adult, they say he did not attend their church as a teenager.
Herring's longtime assistant Phyllis Drummond, who attended Union Baptist for 39 years, said does not think Biden attended in the 1960s.
'No, not at our building,' Drummond told the Washington Free Beacon in a 2020 interview. 'I think he was probably in Claymont, [Del.,] [or] in Pennsylvania then.'
In a separate speech on the campaign trail, Biden repeated his claim he grew up in a black church.
Several members of the Wilmington church Biden claimed to have attended say they never remember seeing him there. Pictured: The president locked arms with Georgia Senator and senior pastor Raphael Warnock and White House adviser Keisha Lance Bottoms while singing 'We Shall Overcome' to end the Sunday service
'When I was a teenager in Delaware, for real, I got involved in the civil rights movement,' Biden said at Bethlehem Baptist Church in South Carolina in January 2020.
'I'd go to 8:00 Mass, then I'd go to Reverend Herring's church where we'd meet in order to organize and figure where we were going to go, whether we were going to desegregate the Rialto movie theater or what we were going to do.'
Biden has even made comments that seem to contradict the account.
When reporters questioned the president's claim in 1987 that he marched in the civil rights movement, he acknowledged that he 'wasn't an activist' and that his most significant experience with civil rights as a youth was when he worked at a swimming pool with mostly black customers as a college sophomore in 1962.
Revelations that Biden may have been exaggerating his history attending a black church and participating in the civil rights movement came around the same time during the campaign that he forced to admit his repeated claims about being arrested with Young in apartheid-era South Africa were untrue.
'I was never arrested, and I don't think [Biden] was either,' Young said at the time.
'I guess I wasn't arrested, I was stopped,' Biden said.
