President Biden appeared to attempt to rehabilitate the image of notorious late pro-segregation Sen. Strom Thurmond on Monday during one of the final speeches of his presidency.
Biden made the comments while speaking at a White House reception for new Democratic members of Congress. The president offered up several redeeming details about Thurmond, though he said he wasn't defending the man.
"In my career I have been asked to do the eulogy of the most incredibly different people. Strom Thurmond, 100 years old. On his deathbed, I get a phone call from the hospital. From the hospital, from out of Walter Reed and his wife, Nancy said. Joe, I'm here with the doctors at the nurses station. Strom asked me to ask you whether or not you'd do his eulogy," Biden said, adding that he accepted the offer.
"Strom Thurmond decided that separate but equal was not right, not that Blacks and Whites should be together. But if you do separate equal, you had to spend as much money on Black schools as White schools. By the time Strom Thurmond left the United States Senate, he had. And I'm making the case for him," Biden continued.
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"But he had more African-Americans in his staff than any United States senator had, more. Strom Thurmond had an illegitimate child with a Black woman [and he] never denied it. Never stopped paying for his upbringing. There's a lot of strange people, a lot of different people. And I mean, well, I bet I can look at you and I can find some strange things too," Biden added.
Biden has repeatedly mentioned his relationship with Thurmond at various times during his presidency. He claimed in August 2023 that he had "literally" convinced Thurmond to vote for the Voting Rights Act before his death in 2003, when he was just 21 years old.
"I was able to — literally, not figuratively — talk Strom Thurmond into voting for the Civil Rights Act before he died," Biden said at the time.
"And I thought, ‘well, maybe there’s real progress,'" he added. "But hate never dies, it just hides. It hides under the rocks."
Biden was born on Nov. 20, 1942. The Civil Rights Act passed the Senate on June 19, 1964.
While Thurmond and Biden were contemporaries in the Senate, the president would have been 21 at the time of the landmark legislation's passing — and nowhere near the Senate seat he won at 29 years old.
Fox News' Houston Keene contributed to this report.
