Wilmington was no different. While busing had been successful in a number of cities, by the time it came to Delaware, resistance was intensifying, and Biden—who genuinely cared about civil rights but perhaps cared more about being reelected—found himself in a bind.
Biden had deftly avoided the issue during his 1972 campaign while trying to placate busing foes. Announcing his run, he termed busing “a phony issue which allows the white liberals to sit in suburbia, confident that they are not going to have to live next to a black,” something that made “great discussions at cocktail parties but do[es] not change the direction of this country.”61
He threaded a perilous needle. On the one hand, he opposed redrawing school district lines for the sake of racial balance (a concept, he said, which “in and of itself means nothing”), maintained that “nobody supports” busing for that purpose, and wrongly insisted, as he would for years after, that Wilmington’s was a question of de facto, not de jure, segregation—meaning segregation that supposedly developed “naturally,” not as the result of explicit laws and policies. At the same time, he balked at voting to limit the Supreme Court’s power to deem what was and wasn’t de jure, and he refused to back a constitutional amendment banning busing. Such careful waffling got Biden through the election.62
Consequently, for his first two years in the Senate, Biden cast mostly pro-busing votes masked by anti-busing rhetoric. Two days before the twentieth anniversary of the Brown decision, he put his weight behind the single-vote defeat of the Gurney amendment, a measure that, by limiting busing to a student’s second-closest school, would have barred virtually all busing for the purpose of desegregation.63
Then the outrage started.
Incensed by this vote, local anti-busing groups began confronting Biden about the issue—in one instance for two hours as a hostile audience of hundreds interrupted and heckled him without pause. Nothing worked in this environment: not Biden’s insistence that he really did oppose busing, not his usual reminder that his liberal friends weren’t happy with him either, not even partially reversing course by repeatedly promising to back a constitutional amendment limiting busing.64
This anti-busing activism had been inflamed by a 1974 court order forcing Wilmington to desegregate its schools. In that year’s Milliken v. Bradley decision, a divided Supreme Court had ruled that suburbs could only be forced to participate in such actions if it could be proved that “racially discriminatory acts of the state or local school districts” had been “a substantial cause” of segregation, effectively insulating Northern cities from having to do anything about the problem.
Biden insisted that only de jure segregation needed remedying, but proving intentional racism in court was a tall order, as today’s activists and lawyers continue to find. Even proof didn’t necessarily matter: in the Milliken case, one mayor had placed his fondness for segregation on the record in print, and the Supreme Court still ruled there was no evidence of intentional racism. And contrary to Biden’s protestations that segregation in Wilmington was simply a “long-standing pattern of racial isolation,” not de jure segregation, it was one of the few cities that met the court’s stringent post-Milliken criteria.65
Nevertheless, for the next three years, Biden cast only a single pro-busing vote and nineteen against. He had, as the Wilmington Morning News put it, become a “born-again convert to anti-busing,” one who, like many such converts, “has embraced his new faith with an almost messianic zeal.”66
Ending his fence-sitting by August 1975, he compared busing to the quagmire in Vietnam and preemptively signed on to the anti-busing bills put forward by his Republican counterpart from Delaware, William Roth, with whom he teamed up.67 He was against segregated schools, Biden said, but didn’t support integrated schools as a matter of course either, because there was a “conceptual difference between desegregation and integration.” He elaborated:
If there were a gas station which served 50 people on a given day and 25 of them were white and 25 of them were black, you don’t shut down the gas station because it can’t prove that exactly half of the people who used the gas station toilet were from each race. What you do is make sure there is no sign on that gas station toilet which says “No Negroes.”68
Biden’s analogy made no sense; no one was talking about shutting down schools, and there was ample data proving that Wilmington schools were heavily racially imbalanced. But of course, that wasn’t the point. Biden often twisted himself up in such knots to justify what he was now doing.
Biden still claimed to oppose discrimination. “You shouldn’t hate black kids,” he said about busing to a visiting troupe of Delaware fifth graders in the US Capitol. “They had nothing to do with it.” He warned the children not to let their parents teach them to hate either, congratulating himself on his audacity. 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”