Joe Biden Recalls Hanging Out With Black Athletes as Lifeguard: ‘It Was Like the Green Mile’

2020 Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden compared hanging out with Black athletes as a lifeguard in his youth to The Green Mile on Tuesday.

Talking to reporters on Election Day in Wilmington, Delaware — where Biden was raised — he said, “The leadership of the community from here, from Riverside all the way up to places run on the east side was overwhelmingly African-American… The Black church was the heart and soul of the entire movement for people here.”

“When I started off as a kid getting involved, I had a job with a nice country club kind of pool as a lifeguard. I wanted to work on the east side because I knew, I played ball with a lot of great Black athletes but, you know, I didn’t know them,” he recalled. “I mean, we knew each other, they were friends, but I didn’t know them, and it was a great education.”

“It was like the Green Mile, you know. Have you seen the movie?” he asked reporters. “Well, it’s like that.”

Biden explained, “You began to, when you realize that the people I’d known for a long time, that, you know, they lived in the middle of a city and a county that was white and they didn’t know anybody. I mean, they knew, but they didn’t know anybody, and it was a real education for me.”

“I’m not being melodramatic. I mean, it really was,” he concluded.

The Green Mile, a 1999 movie based on the novel by Stephen King, is about an African-American man on death row.

Watch above via MSNBC.

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