Biden repeats dubious claim that he frequented a black church during the civil rights movement

In his speech on the occasion of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, President Biden repeated the dubious claim that he frequented a black church during the civil rights movement.

Biden gave a speech at the historic Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta on Sunday to mark the slain civil rights activist’s 94th birthday. The President began his speech by repeating a claim that he was connected to the civil rights movement, which has been disputed many times in the past.

“Let’s forget one thing. I may be a practicing Catholic, but I used to go to Mass at 7:30 every morning in high school and then in college before I went to a black church.” Biden said. “Not a joke. Andy knows it.”

“Andy, it’s so good to see you, man,” the president continued, referring to former UN ambassador and former executive director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Andrew Yang. “You are one of the best we have ever had. Andy and I took on apartheid in South Africa and more. march and city desegregation”.

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During his 2020 presidential campaign, Biden frequently mentioned how he would help organize anti-segregation protests at the Union Baptist Church, a prominent black church led by the late Reverend Otis Herring in Wilmington, Delaware.

“When I was a teenager in Delaware, I was really involved in the civil rights movement,” Biden said at Bethlehem Baptist Church in South Carolina in January 2020. “I went to 8 o’clock mass, then went to the Reverend Herring Church where we met to organize and decide where we were going to go, if we were going to desegregate the Rialto cinema or what we were going to do.”

While Richard “Mouse” Smith, former president of the Delaware NAACP, defended Biden in a 2019 article, stating, “We know Joe as an ally who stood by our side to protest the Rialto Theater’s discriminatory policy of dividing moviegoers based on race.” his claim to attend Herring’s church was disputed.

President Joe Biden delivers a sermon at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia on January 15, 2023.
(Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images)

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Longtime parishioners told the Washington Free Beacon at the time that they did not remember Biden attending church. The revelation came at about the same time that Biden was forced to admit that his repeated claims of being arrested with Young in apartheid-era South Africa were untrue.

“I’ve never been arrested and I don’t think [Biden] was too,” Young said at the time.

“I think I was not arrested, I was stopped,” Biden admitted.

President Joe Biden walks to speak to reporters as he and First Lady Jill Biden leave the White House on December 27, 2022.
(Anna Moneymaker)

Biden also admitted in the 1980s that he was not a civil rights activist and never marched during the movement.

“Actually, I was very concerned about the civil rights movement in the 1960s,” Biden, who was running for president at the time, said during a 1987 speech. — I was not an activist. an all-black pool in east Wilmington, Delaware. I was involved in what they thought, what they felt.”

“But I didn’t march, I wasn’t in Selma,” he continued. “I was nowhere else.”

Biden’s Ebenezer speech Sunday came as he was embroiled in controversy over alleged mishandling of classified Obama-era documents.

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Attorney General Merrick Garland on Thursday announced the appointment of a special counsel to investigate the president’s handling of classified documents since stepping down as vice president in 2017. On Saturday, the White House said five more classified documents were found at Biden’s Wilmington home.

Biden was invited to Ebenezer by Democratic Senator Raphael Warnock, senior pastor.

The White House did not respond to Fox News Digital’s request for comment.

Thomas Catenacci of Fox News and The Associated Press contributed to this report.