Democratic US presidential hopeful and former vice president Joe Biden has drawn rebukes from nomination rivals for invoking two segregationist senators as he recalled the “civility” of earlier political eras (ALEX WONG)

Washington (AFP) – Joe Biden drew condemnation Wednesday from fellow Democratic presidential contenders and demands for an apology after he defended his old-fashioned political style by recalling the “civility” with which he treated two segregationist US senators.

Speaking at a New York fundraiser Tuesday, the ex-vice president and frontrunner for the Democratic nomination told donors that fixing America’s “broken” political system would require working across the political aisle to reach consensus with lawmakers with opposing positions, even unrepentant bigots.

Biden, who spent more than three decades in the US Senate, named late senators James Eastland of Mississippi and Herman Talmadge of Georgia, both Democrats who fiercely opposed desegregation, as opponents who were in his own party when he entered the chamber in 1973.

Eastland “never called me ‘boy,’ he always called me ‘son,'” Biden said of the former Senate Judiciary Committee chairman, according to a pool report released after the fundraiser.

Eastland, who left the Senate in 1978, was known to speak of blacks as “an inferior race.”

Talmadge was “one of the meanest guys I ever knew,” Biden said of the lawmaker who opposed the 1954 Supreme Court decision on school desegregation.

“Well guess what? At least there was some civility,” he added. “We didn’t agree on much of anything. We got things done.”

The 76-year-old has been criticized as a political relic by some Democrats, an elder statesman who has held controversial positions and who has only reluctantly changed with the times.

The senior Democrat’s remarks were awkwardly timed, coming one day before Juneteenth, the annual commemoration of the emancipation from slavery in 1865.

Senator Cory Booker, one of two prominent African Americans in the presidential race, called on Biden to apologize.

“Vice president Biden’s relationships with proud segregationists are not the model for how we make America a safer and more inclusive place for black people, and for everyone,” he said.

Fellow 2020 candidate and New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, whose wife is black, tweeted that Biden “repeatedly demonstrates that he is out of step with the values of the modern Democratic Party.”

Biden, who served eight years as Barack Obama’s deputy, remains a popular figure for African Americans, despite his treatment of witness Anita Hill during contentious Supreme Court hearings in 1991, and criticism that he supported 1990s crime legislation that fueled mass incarceration of blacks.

His campaign did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Disclaimer: Validity of the above story is for 7 Days from original date of publishing. Source: AFP.