Biden Talked of Attending Black Church As a Teen, But Members Don’t Recall It

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.