As presidential hopeful Joe Biden’s record on racial issues comes under increased scrutiny, comments from his past are haunting him including one where he said that non-“orderly” racial integration would cause his children to “grow up in a racial jungle.”
Biden denies that he opposed voluntary busing in the 1970s, but he was one of the Senate’s most vocal opponents of federally-mandated busing, according to a New York Times article. The Times reported Biden’s comments on busing and desegregation in a July 2019 article.
Daria Roithmayr, a University of Southern California Law School professor and scholar, found Biden’s jungle quote, which appears to be from a 1977 congressional hearing related to anti-busing legislation, Business Insider reported. Biden emphasized wanting to “insure we do have orderly integration of society,” adding he was “not just talking about education but all of society.”
Biden worried that court-ordered busing would cause resentment among Black and white students and lead to a “race war”.
“He emerged as the Democratic Party’s leading anti-busing crusader — a position that put him in league with Southern segregationists,” Astead W. Herndon and Sheryl Gay Stolberg wrote for the Times.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 ended segregation in public places.
Hellbound and Down 