Joe Biden to Meet with Black Leaders in South Carolina amid ‘Segregationist’ Fight

Vice President Joe Biden will return to the campaign trail on Friday, traveling to South Carolina for a meeting with black leaders.

The meeting will be closed to the press, according to a campaign advisory.

Biden spent Thursday off the campaign trail after fellow Democrats condemned his comments about a time of “civility” when he was a Senator working with segregationist Democrats.

But he plans to reemerge to attend Rep. Jim Clyburn’s “World Famous Fish Fry” in South Carolina on Friday as well as the South Carolina Democratic Party’s Blue Palmetto Dinner. Both events are open to the press.

Biden already got support from Clyburn in the ongoing controversy over his comments.

“If I had only worked with people who opposed segregation, I never would have worked with people who were not my color,” Clyburn said to McClatchy.

Clyburn also defended Biden’s role in the 1990s-era crime bill that critics hate for increasing incarceration numbers for black Americans.

2020 rival Sen. Cory Booker first condemned Biden for remarks in which the former vice president joked that a segregationist Democrat senator called him “son” instead of the more derogatory term “boy.”

“You don’t joke about calling black men ‘boys.’ Men like James O. Eastland used words like that, and the racist policies that accompanied them, to perpetuation white supremacy and strip black Americans of our very humanity,” Booker said in a statement.

Biden responded by demanding that Booker apologize, noting that “there’s not a racist bone in my body.”