Members Don’t Recall Biden’s Attendance at Black Church as Teen

Biden campaign trail anecdote called into question

On the campaign trail, Joe Biden has talked frequently about his early years in the civil rights movement. As a teenager, he says, he regularly attended a black church in Wilmington, Del., where he was involved in organizing anti-segregation protests in the early 1960s.

"I got raised in the black church," Biden said in a speech to Jesse Jackson's Rainbow PUSH coalition last year. "We would go sit in Rev. Herring's church, sit there before we'd go out, and try to change things when I was a kid in college and in high school."

The church Biden referenced, Union Baptist Church, was a prominent African-American church in Wilmington run by Rev. Otis Herring, an acclaimed pastor who passed away in 1996. But Biden has made comments that seem to contradict the account. When reporters questioned Biden's claim in 1987 that he marched in the civil rights movement, he acknowledged that he "wasn't an activist" and that his most significant experience with civil rights as a youth was when he worked at a majority-black swimming pool as a college sophomore in 1962.

Now, interviews with long-time church members are raising questions about his story. Biden befriended Herring as an adult, they say, but they do not recall him attending the church as a teenager.

Phyllis Drummond, Herring's longtime assistant who attended Union Baptist for 39 years, said she was not involved with the church in the early 1960s but does not think Biden attended at that time. "No. Not at our building. I think he was probably in Claymont, [Del.,] [or] in Pennsylvania then," Drummond told the Washington Free Beacon.

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