"I've been around so long, I worked with James Eastland," Biden said at a
campaign rally for Sen. Doug Jones, D-Ala., in 2017. "Even in the days when I got there, the Democratic Party still had seven or eight old-fashioned Democratic segregationists. You'd get up and you'd argue like the devil with them. Then you'd go down and have lunch or dinner together. The political system worked. We were divided on issues, but the political system worked."
Eastland, a Democrat from Mississippi who died in 1986, said
many times that he thought black people belonged to "an inferior race." When later asked if he would change anything in his political career, he said that he "voted my convictions on everything.''
When Biden faced a re-election in 1978, Eastland even offered to help Biden's Senate campaign. "I looked at Eastland. He said, 'What can old Jim Eastland do for you in Delaware?'"
Biden recounted at a 2016 Labor Day event in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. "I said, 'Mr. Chairman, some places you'd help and some places you'd hurt.' He said, 'Well, I'll come to Delaware and campaign for you or against you, whichever will help the most.'"
Sen. Strom Thurmond, R-S.C., gave the
longest filibuster in the history of the Senate against the Civil Rights Act of 1957. In 1948, when Thurmond was the governor of South Carolina and seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, he displayed blatant
racism in a speech at the States' Rights Democrats, or "Dixiecrats," convention:
"There's not enough troops in the army, to force the Southern people to break down segregation and admit the [N-word] race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes, and into our churches," Thurmond said.
Biden said he became "good friends" with Thurmond, who lived to 100, and his wife. He gave a
eulogy at his funeral in 2003, in which he noted that Thurmond voted in favor of expanding the Voting Rights Act and making Martin Luther King Jr. Day a holiday, and stated that Thurmond changed his views later in life.
Sen. Jesse Helms, R-N.C., is known for opposing a national holiday for Martin Luther King Jr. and opposing the busing of black students to end segregation in schools. In his
farewell speech to the Senate in 2009, Biden mentioned that Helms became his friend and his wife became a "close friend that I still kept in contact with."
While Biden now highlights his disagreements with segregationists and separates himself from their politics when he mentions them, in the 70s, he
supported anti-busing amendmentsintroduced by Helms and Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., a former Ku Klux Klan recruiter who later renounced his racist past.
