Biden’s time as a suburban public housing advocate before entering politics led him to claim he was strongly backed by his local black community. “I still walk down the street in the black side of town,” he told the Washington Post in 1975. “Mousey and Chops and all the boys at 13th, and — I can walk in those pool halls, and quite frankly don’t know another white man involved in Delaware politics who can do that kind of thing.”

There’s a good reason Biden felt the need to boast about his supposed closeness with Delaware’s black community at this time. In an attempt to remedy pervasive racial segregation, that decade saw cities start to bus black students into suburban schools and white students into inner city schools. Biden earned controversy by becoming one of the program’s fiercest opponents.

Biden called busing “the atom bomb of anti-discrimination weapons,” and worked to stop busing in his home state, calling it “the single most devastating issue that could occur to Delaware.” In 1975, he put forward an anti-busing provision that barred the Department of Health, Education and Welfare from using federal funds “to assign students or teachers by race,” broad language that actually barred the department from taking anti-segregation actions beyond just busing.