Civil-Rights Icon John Lewis Defends Biden’s Segregationist Comments
Civil-Rights Icon John Lewis Defends Biden’s Segregationist Comments
(Bloomberg) -- Civil rights icon John Lewis weighed in to defend Democratic presidential front-runner Joe Biden, who is mired in a controversy involving comments he made about working cooperatively with segregationist senators in the 1970s.
Lewis, a House Democrat from Georgia and a sought-after endorsement in the race for the 2020 nomination, told reporters Friday that he was not offended by Biden’s remarks about the “civility” he was able to maintain with southern Democrats who backed segregation.
“I don’t think the remarks are offensive,” Lewis said outside the U.S. Capitol. “At the height of the civil rights movement, we worked with people and got to know people that were members of the Klan. People who opposed us, even people who beat us, arrested us and jailed us. We never gave up on our fellow human beings.”
Lewis’s comments could be helpful to Biden, who has worked in recent days to quell criticism from the two major African-American candidates in the contest, Senators Kamala Harris of California and Cory Booker of New Jersey. Biden’s rejection of Booker’s call to apologize for his earlier remarks further fueled the controversy.
Black Caucus
Biden discussed the matter Thursday evening with members of the Congressional Black Caucus at a gathering arranged before his comments, according to a person familiar with the topics at the meeting.
Another prominent House Democrat and civil rights leader, Representative James Clyburn of South Carolina, also defended Biden this week, telling McClatchy that as a rising black politician in the Jim Crow South he needed to work with white leaders and politicians who largely opposed civil rights.
“If I had only worked with people who opposed segregation, I never would have worked with people who were not my color,” said Clyburn, who worked in state and local government beginning in the 1960s before winning election to the U.S. House in 1992.
The dispute erupted Tuesday after Biden recalled his interactions during his early years as senator from Delaware with the two prominent advocates of segregation. Senator James Eastland of Mississippi, Biden said with a heavy Southern drawl, “never called me boy, he always called me son.” Senator Herman Talmadge of Georgia, he added, was “one of the meanest guys I ever knew, you go down the list of all these guys” but “at least there was some civility.”
Both Lewis -- who marched from Selma-to-Montgomery with Martin Luther King Jr. in 1965 -- and Clyburn are among the top endorsements sought by candidates in the contest, in part because the black vote will be pivotal in the Democratic race in the early primary state of South Carolina and in other key southern states.
Lewis, 79, switched his backing from Hillary Clinton to Barack Obama in February 2008, a devastating blow for Clinton as the primary season entered full gear. Clyburn, 78, also endorsed Obama, though he waited until all the states had voted in the primaries.
Both of the prominent black lawmakers backed Clinton in 2016, and this time each has said they won’t decide who they will back for some time.
In a sign of Clyburn’s clout in the Palmetto State, Biden and 20 of the other Democratic hopefuls Friday night will attend Clyburn’s “World Famous Fish Fry” in Columbia, South Carolina. The highly attended political event will let the candidates rub elbows with voters in a state where black voters account for about 60% of the Democratic electorate.
To contact the reporter on this story: Laura Litvan in Washington at llitvan@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Joe Sobczyk at jsobczyk@bloomberg.net, Max Berley, Steve Geimann
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