During a Sunday speech at Martin Luther King Jr.’s Atlanta church, Ebenezer Baptist Church, President Joe Biden made a point to emphasize the fact that he attended “the black church” during his high school and college years.
There’s one small problem with the president’s story: members of the church he claims to have gone to don’t remember him.
According to PBS, Biden was invited to speak as part of a celebration of King’s legacy ahead of his birthday Monday.
Biden: “I used to go to 7:30 mass every morning in high school and then in college, before I went to the Black church. Not a joke.” (Not a thing he ever did)
pic.twitter.com/1iz2AgPt26— Greg Price (@greg_price11) January 15, 2023
“I used to go to 7:30 mass every morning in high school and then in college before I went to the black church. Not a joke,” Biden said.
The president has made similar claims in the past, including during a 2019 speech for Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow PUSH coalition, The Washington Free Beacon reported.
“I got raised in the black church,” Biden said.
“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 in question, Union Baptist Church in Wilmington, Delaware, was run by Rev. Otis Herring until his passing in 1996, the Free Beacon reported.
A number of long-time church members have no memory of the young Biden ever attending a Union Baptist Church service.
“No. Not at our building. I think he was probably in Claymont, [Del.,] [or] in Pennsylvania then,” one member told the Free Beacon in 2020.
Another member, Juanita Matthew, who had been attending services at Union Baptist since the ’70s, doesn’t remember Biden either.
That being said, when Biden first became a newly elected senator, he became a friend of the church and Rev. Herring shortly after his first wife and daughter died in a car accident, Matthew told the Free Beacon.
Doubt over Biden’s claims isn’t only coming from conservative sources.
Shaun King, a prominent leader in the politically progressive Black Lives Matter movement, also claims to have interviewed Union Baptist Church members who don’t remember Biden.
According to King, Biden has also made the claim that he attended another black church headed up by the late Reverend Maurice Moyer.
“I spoke to former members of their churches, as well as people close to both families. Neither stories are true,” King reported.
“Joe Biden met both of these men much later in life and only learned about their great work in retrospect.”
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.