Joe Biden: Presidential hopeful and Barack Obama stan
Joe Biden: Presidential hopeful and Barack Obama stan. Win McNamee/Getty

Joe Biden, Barack Obama's biggest fan and the current front-runner (for some reason) for the Democratic nomination for president, is becoming increasingly famous for his uncanny ability to stick his foot in his mouth. Over the weekend, a 2017 video resurfaced on social media that had a lot of people asking, "What the fuck is that man thinking?"

This all started when Michael Harriot, a senior writer at the Root, posted a very funny thread on Twitter questioning the veracity of a story Biden told in his 2007 memoir about his time working as a lifeguard at a black pool in 1962. It's a long thread (read it all here), but he starts out:



Shortly after this started to gain traction, a columnist for the conservative Daily Caller posted a video of Biden recounting this same story in 2017 at a dedication ceremony renaming that same pool in his honor.


The video is worth watching, but if you don't have time, Biden recalled how, in 1962, while he was working at a lifeguard at that same pool, he had a run-in with a Mr. "CornPop," who was in a local gang called the Romans, after CornPop got up to no good on the diving board.

"He ran a bunch of bad boys," Biden said. "And back in those days—to show how things have changed—one of the things you had to use, if you used pomade in your hair, you had to wear a bathing cap. And so he was up on the board and wouldn't listen to me. I said, 'Hey, Esther, you! Off the board, or I'll come up and drag you off.' Well, he came off, and he said, 'I'll meet you outside.'"

The "Esther" Biden was referring to was Esther Jane Williams, a competitive swimmer and—the basis of the insult—a woman.

Biden continued: "[CornPop] was waiting for me with three guys with straight razors. Not a joke. There was a guy named Bill Wright, the only white guy, and he did all the pools. He was a mechanic. And I said, 'What am I gonna do?' And he said. 'Come down here in the basement, where all the mechanics—where all the pool builder is.' You know the chain, there used to be a chain that went across the deep end. And he cut off a six-foot length of chain, and folded it up and he said, 'You walk out with that chain, and you walk to the car and say, "You may cut me man, but I'm gonna wrap this chain around your head."'

"I said, 'You're kidding me.'

"He said, 'No. If you don't, don't come back.'

"And he was right. So I walked out with the chain. And I walked up to my car. And in those days, you remember the straight razors, you had to bang 'em on the curb, gettin' em rusty, puttin' em in the rain barrel, gettin' em rusty? And I looked at him, but I was smart, then. I said, 'First of all,' I said, 'when I tell you to get off the board, you get off the board, and I'll kick you out again, but I shouldn't have called you 'Esther Williams,' and I apologize for that. I apologize.' But I didn't know that apology was gonna work.

"He said, 'You apologize to me?'

"I said, 'I apologize, but not for throwing you out, but I apologize for what I said.'

"He said, 'OK,' closed that straight razor, and my heart began to beat again."

Crazy story, right? It sounds like a story your semi-racist great-uncle would recount at Christmas dinner after one shandy too many. Biden was widely ridiculed for this, and there's already a T-shirt making fun of the whole thing.

But it might actually be true.

CNN reporter Daniel Dale looked into this story, and, turns out, there really was a gang named the Romans and a man named CornPop in Wilmington at that time. Dale found CornPop's 2016 obituary and got a comment from former Wilmington mayor Dennis Williams, who grew up near CornPop in a housing project. Not only did Williams say that CornPop was as "real as the moon in the sky," he also said that he heard about the confrontation between Biden and CornPop the day after it happened. Dale also found that during the 2017 pool dedication ceremony, former state NAACP president Richard “Mouse” Smith also corroborated Biden's story.

Ironically, the Root, the very outlet where Harriot works, wrote about this incident in a 2010 piece entitled "Joe Biden's Black Pass." The author of that piece, Chana Garcia, wrote of Biden, "I was born in Delaware, and as a kid, I remember Biden's name being dropped casually in conversations as if he were an extended member of the family. It still is."

It would be interesting to get Garcia's take on this now. Unfortunately, she passed away earlier this year.

While Biden is largely unpopular among young, white, progressive voters, he is by far the most popular candidate among older black voters. (Younger black voters? Not so much.) A recent poll by CNN found that 42 percent of black voters named Biden as the candidate they are most likely to support. The next highest ranked, Kamala Harris, came in at just 12 percent.

Is every word of Joe Biden's story about CornPop true? I have no idea, but his support among older black voters (a large segment of the Democratic primary electorate) is certainly real, and if the other candidates want to win this demographic, they might want to figure out exactly what is it that Joe Biden is doing right.