Speaking at the funeral of Hollings, the former South Carolina senator who died this month at 97, Biden hailed his longtime friend and former colleague, a one-time segregationist, as the embodiment of this state’s growth.
“People can change,” Biden said of Hollings, who was known as “Fritz,” adding: “We can learn from the past and build a better future.”
Biden’s trip here marked his first visit to an early nominating state this year and came just a week before he is expected to make his long-anticipated entry into the Democratic presidential primary.
His somber appearance at The Citadel, South Carolina’s storied military college and Hollings’ alma mater, was not the 2020 debut the former vice-president and his aides were planning. But his eulogy underscored Biden’s deep ties to this pivotal state with its high percentage of black voters — and the promise and peril of his candidacy.
Biden once described Hollings as his best friend in the Senate. And as he recalled in strikingly subdued tones Tuesday, it was Hollings and his late wife, Peatsy, who helped convince him to remain in the Senate when his wife and daughter were killed in a car accident shortly after he was first elected in 1972.
“Aside from my family, the first people to bring me back from that black hole I was in were Fritz and Peatsy, that’s not hyperbole,” he said.
That friendship is what first brought Biden to South Carolina, where Hollings would introduce him to many of his political allies. Eventually, Biden began vacationing in the state, usually staying on one of the barrier islands near Hollings’ native Charleston. The relationships Biden developed here now form the nucleus of his support network in the first-in-the-South primary state.
Those connections were on vivid display as the former vice president stood before hundreds of mourners in the cadet chapel. It was an audience that included scores of influential state and local Democratic officials such as Rep. James Clyburn, a fellow eulogist and the highest ranking African-American in Congress.
The funeral reflected the era of the man his admirers had come to honor, with gray hair filling the pews and sepia-toned memories flowing from the pulpit of a lawmaker who was first elected to office in the aftermath of World War II and retired from the Senate 15 years ago.
Such older voters here and beyond make up the core of Biden’s initial base, early polls indicate, and are the sort of reliable participants in primaries that candidates covet. Former Charleston Mayor Joseph P. Riley Jr., for example, attended the service and said in a brief interview that he intended to support Biden.
But as the former vice president extolled an earlier, less rancorous political era in his tribute to Hollings, the challenges he will face in this coming campaign were also difficult to miss.
Younger Democrats have little personal connection to Hollings and those that are aware of him recall that he began his career, like many other white politicians of his generation in the South, as a segregationist.
Biden, who is himself facing intense questions about his 1970s opposition to school busing, handled Hollings’ evolution on race delicately in his speech, referring only obliquely to the late senator’s earlier support for segregation.
“He was constantly evolving,” said Biden, standing before a Citadel choir featuring black and white members.
It fell to Clyburn to speak in more detail about how Hollings went from defending “separate but equal” as a young legislator to eventually telling state lawmakers that “we have run out of courts” and supporting the integration of Clemson University.
“Thank God a man can grow,” said Clyburn, his voice breaking.
Neither he nor Biden mentioned the fact that the Confederate flag was raised atop South Carolina’s capitol dome in 1961 when Hollings was governor. The flag would remain on the statehouse grounds until 2015 when it was finally removed in the aftermath of the racist killing of black parishioners at Charleston’s Mother Emanuel church.
“He put the Confederate flag on the statehouse that we had to fight to take down,” said Melissa Watson, a Charleston-area teacher and local Democratic official who is black. Watson praised Hollings as “a statesman” but said he changed his views on race because “he didn’t have a choice.”
Hollings was elected to the Senate in 1966, a year after the Voting Rights Act secured the franchise for African-Americans in the South, and would rely on black votes throughout his career in a state that eventually become a Republican bulwark.
In 2015, a federal courthouse in Charleston was named for Hollings. But, as Biden noted, he rejected the honor and asked that it be named instead for J. Waties Waring, a local federal judge and lonely voice for integration in the Civil Rights era.
Biden was not the only former senator in attendance: Former Secretary of State John F. Kerry and former Sen. Christopher J. Dodd of Connecticut both came to pay their respects.
Kerry acknowledged that he had given some consideration to making a 2020 presidential bid of his own, but he said: “I want to see what Joe is going to do.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.