Joe Biden didn't just compromise with segregationists. He fought for their cause in schools, experts say

In a 1975 Senate hearing, the legendary civil rights lawyer Jack Greenberg had something to say to freshman Sen. Joe Biden.

Greenberg, longtime director of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, took Biden to task for sponsoring a bill that would limit the power of courts to order school desegregation with busing. It was a move that followed the wishes of many of Biden’s white constituents in Delaware.

The bill “heaves a brick through the window of school integration,” said Greenberg, one of the lawyers who had won the Brown v. Board of Education case that ended legal school segregation 21 years earlier. And according to Greenberg, Biden was the man with his hand on the brick.

Biden’s role in fighting student busing more than four decades ago has received renewed attention after the 76-year-old presidential candidate touted his ability to compromise with segregationists during his long Senate career. Biden said he disagreed strongly with these southerners’ views but needed to work with them to get things done. Biden’s comments set off a firestorm among his political rivals and some political analysts, who described his language as offensive and anachronistic.

But political experts and education policy researchers say Biden, a supporter of civil rights in other arenas, did not simply compromise with segregationists — he also led the charge on an issue that kept black students away from the classrooms of white students. His legislative work against school integration advanced a more palatable version of the “separate but equal” doctrine and undermined the nation’s short-lived effort at educational equality, legislative and education history experts say.