Joe Biden Launches HBCU Outreach Campaign

By Rosaland Tyler
Associate Editor
New Journal and Guide

Joe Biden’s presidential campaign recently launched a program designed to organize grassroots support at Historically Black Colleges and Universities after recent national polls showed young African-Americans are more likely to support Democratic candidates Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders.

Surrogates will visit HBCUs in the final weeks before Democratic primary voters head to the polls. Biden’s team aims to shore up his support among African-American youth by highlighting the former vice president’s plan to provide increased funding to HBCUs. Biden’s campaign staff will also train student leaders to organize on campus. 

The campaign announced that three student leaders – Adunola Rachel Osinuga of Texas Southern University in Houston; Nia Page, the Student Government Association president at Spelman College in Atlanta; and William Fairfax of Claflin University in South Carolina – will serve as co-chairs for “HBCU Students for Biden.”

As other candidates make increasingly vocal appeals to African-Americans, Biden says he stands apart because he’s been with African-American voters since the beginning of his political career as a member of the New Castle County Council in Delaware.

“I’ve always been comfortable with the community, and I think the community’s always been comfortable with me,” he said at a December meeting in Atlanta with a group of African-American mayors.

That same month, he received support from one of the leading Latinos in Congress, with the chairman of the Hispanic Caucus’ political arm endorsing the former vice president as Democrats’ best hope.

A recent Washington Post-Ipsos showed that 48 percent of Democratic-leaning African-American voters back Biden as their choice for president, citing his time as former President Barack Obama’s vice president among reasons for their support.