That comment, he said, “loses me 5,000 parents’ votes, but I don’t give a damn.”69
Even as experts and officials told Biden desegregation was impossible without busing, he maintained it didn’t address “the real issues.” He even claimed it was integration in some of its forms that was “racist and insulting.” Besides, he said, his anti-busing crusade was really in the interest of saving civil rights. “The civil rights movement will come to a dead halt,” he warned. “When you lose the support of that great unwashed middle-class, of which I am a part, no social policy in this country will move.”70
But Biden was also clearly worried about reelection. “He knows the votes are in the suburbs where whites turn red when they see a yellow school bus,” the Wilmington News Journal noted. Biden himself said that Sussex County, Delaware’s most anti-busing county, was critical to winning the state.71
His comments also touched on a belief, hinted at elsewhere, that racial separation was natural. At a 1975 Greenville, South Carolina fundraising dinner, he had disparaged liberals who attributed America’s strength to its status as a “great melting pot.” “That is just a bunch of poppycock because we know being black and white and Christian and Jew breaks us apart,” he told the more than 300 Democrats in attendance. The same year, Biden indicted both busing and the idea “that we are going to integrate people so that they all have the same access and they learn to grow up with one another and all the rest” as a “rejection of the whole movement of black pride.”72
In May 1975, Biden had promised to stand in the way of “unconstitutional” attempts to restrict the power of courts to order busing.73 By February the following year, he had introduced just such a preposterous bill, aiming to allow only state courts to order remedies in school cases. Another amendment he authored that year prohibited the Department of Justice (DoJ) from using its funds to seek busing. A fellow Democrat charged that the “disastrous” measure would tie the DoJ’s hands in advising courts on the scope of desegregation redresses. A third bill, this one imposing on federal judges a “priority list” of desegregation remedies that put busing at the bottom, was opposed even by anti-busing Democrat Robert Byrd, who called it unconstitutional and charged it would have no impact on court-ordered busing. The unsuccessful 1977 Roth-Biden bill—which would have delayed busing until all court appeals were exhausted and conditioned its use on a court finding that intentional racism was the “principal motivating factor” in school segregation—was harshly criticized by the attorney general, who charged that it would “unnecessarily and detrimentally complicate the area of school desegregation” through litigation and delay.74
Biden’s lasting achievement would instead be the 1977 Eagleton-Biden amendment, which barred HEW from using its funding for busing. So effective was it in halting the department’s desegregation efforts that civil rights groups challenged its constitutionality. A superintendent in Ocala, Florida, was informed by HEW that the district’s “voluntary compliance” with a school desegregation plan couldn’t be completed because the tool of busing was now forbidden by the law. On the 25th anniversary of the Brown decision, the Civil Rights Commission published a report bitterly noting the lack of progress on desegregation and criticizing the amendment. The commission’s chairman called for citizens to campaign for its repeal and charged that its passage had “aided and abetted” forces obstructing the advance of desegregation. “This is one of, if not the major civil rights issues confronting the country at this time,” he said. Ironically, since busing in Wilmington had been court-ordered, the amendment had no effect on the policy there. Still, Biden said he was pleased with its effects.75
Biden’s efforts were key to cracking the Democrats’ post-1960s commitment to civil rights. His 1975 amendment barring HEW from forcing school districts to assign pupils or teachers by race may not have become law, but civil rights advocates watched in horror as it drew votes for the first time from prominent Northern liberals. It signaled the end of the narrow but reliable Senate majority that had defended desegregation efforts from assault. Biden “will be remembered for his amendment that first illustrated the Senate’s tilt,” wrote the Wilmington Morning News. The Congressional Quarterly noted that its adoption by the Senate was a major watershed for this same reason, as well as the fact that the upper chamber, usually an obstacle to anti-busing efforts, had led the way this time. Biden himself boasted he’d “made it—if not respectable—I’ve made it reasonable for long-standing liberals to begin to raise the questions I’ve been the first to raise.”76
When even a former Klan recruiter like Byrd thought Biden was taking things too far, it’s not surprising that liberals and the civil rights community were apoplectic. Calling the 1977 Roth-Biden bill “so shabby an attack on the desegregation of school systems,” civil rights attorney Joseph L. Rauh Jr. charged Biden with embracing “the Nixon antibusing spirit.” The Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, a coalition of 140 civil rights, church, and liberal organizations, opposed it unanimously, a rare development. Six civil rights officials personally testified against the bill, with Charles Morgan Jr. of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) comparing Biden’s motives to George Wallace’s “segregation forever” campaign (“I don’t think I like you very much Mr. Morgan,” Biden interrupted). When one NAACP leader commented that the bill was the product of the “sad history” of racism in Delaware, Biden became upset. “My heart is heavy,” he said, his voice cracking. “For the first time, I have heard an indirect insinuation that I’m a racist.” The official clarified that Biden, too, was a victim of racism—namely, the “harassment and abuse” that had led him to oppose busing.77
It didn’t end there. Biden eventually convinced the Justice Department to intervene in Wilmington, though it returned a decision not to his liking. He later grilled two historic nominees about their views on the intervention and busing generally: US Appeals Court Judge Wade McCree, who stood to become the first black solicitor general since Thurgood Marshall, and Drew S. Days III, a black New York attorney tipped to be assistant attorney general for civil rights. On a Judiciary Committee stacked with former Southern segregationists, Biden, the young liberal from a Northern state, became the lone vote against both.78
By November 1980, Biden had backed every anti-busing measure in the Senate over the previous five years. That included repeated votes for anti-busing measures put forward by archconservative Jesse Helms—votes that all came after his reelection. He and Roth even came within a hair’s breadth of passing their 1977 bill to restrict the federal courts from ordering busing, which black Republican Edward Brooke called “the most pernicious amendment that has been introduced in this whole field.” Meanwhile, to Biden’s delight, Congress extended his Biden-Eagleton amendment year after year with ever-bigger majorities, even as HEW officials complained it had taken away one of their key tools—withholding federal funds—to pressure school districts refusing to desegregate. “The erosion [of busing] is on,” Biden said after one such vote. “It gets easier every year.”79
Biden insisted that none of this had hurt his relationship with the local black community. “I still walk down the street in the black side of town,” he said in 1975, “and you get—maybe they’re my clients—Mousey and Chops and all the boys at 13th and—I can walk in those pool halls, and quite frankly don’t know another white man involved in Delaware politics who can do that kind of thing.” Newspapers covering the controversial subject noted his history as a civil rights activist, joining sit-ins to desegregate lunch counters, a staple of Biden lore he would repeat for years. Only a decade later was he forced to admit that his activism consisted entirely of his summer job as a lifeguard.80
Whatever one’s thoughts on busing—and polling suggested even African Americans were split on its merits—there was no doubt that it had worked as a tool for dismantling segregation, nor that it was peacefully accepted in many communities. Its end contributed to a situation today in which school segregation is worse than it’s been for nearly five decades. In working
