The youngest member of the United States Senate, 30-year-old Joe Biden, visited Cumberland School of Law in October 1973 as the nation’s pundits worried a divisive Republican president might leave America forever damaged.

Richard Nixon had just fired Attorney General Archibald Cox as the Watergate scandal dominated Washington politics.

It was, Biden said in Birmingham, not the result of a corrupt president or GOP but a flawed system of financing elections.

“The American public is ripping off the politicians rather than politicians ripping off the people,” The Birmingham Post-Herald reported Biden said. “If you don’t have money … you’re faced with having to prostitute your intellect in order to get funds.”

Biden, now the oldest U.S. President, announced Sunday he would not seek re-election and endorsed Vice-President Kamala Harris.

Biden nine years later made a 1982 speech in Anniston when he was touted as a possible candidate in the 1984 presidential race.

During the 1982 Alabama visit, Biden said he wasn’t running in 1984 but wouldn’t rule out a future presidential run if re-elected to a third term in the senate.

While testing the waters for that 1988 presidential run, Joe Biden visited Birmingham again in 1986.

At a press conference before addressing 1,500 Alabama Democrats at the Jefferson-Jackson Day Dinner, the junior U.S. Senator from Delaware stressed the importance of the South to their party.

“The key to whether the Democratic Party comes back nationally in 1986 and wins back the White House in 1988 is the South and the key to the South is Alabama because it has remained one of the most Democratic states in the South,” Biden said then.

At his 1986 stop, Biden, whose 1988 White House run was derailed amid a plagiarism controversy, took a few digs at Alabama’s junior U.S. Senator, Jeremiah Denton. Biden said the Republican and Vietnam P.O.W. “sometimes gets a little confused.” Denton lost his 1986 re-election bid to then Democrat Richard Shelby.

Alabama’s senior U.S. Senator at the time, Howell Heflin, heaped praise on Biden during the 1986 visit, saying the then 43-year-old was at the top of the party’s potential presidential candidates for 1988 and was “a fresh breeze on the Democratic scene that may develop into a hurricane called Joe before it’s over.”

Biden, Heflin said, had fared well during a visit to Mississippi, and was sympathetic to the South’s “traditions and values.”

The Wilmington Daily Mail, tracking Biden’s budding presidential run, covered the 1986 Birmingham visit. The newspaper noted Biden told Alabama’s Democrats they had confronted the state’s racist problems. “A Black man has a better chance in Birmingham than in Philadelphia or New York,” Biden told the crowd.

The Delaware newspaper also reported Biden removed from his speech planned references to his participation in civil rights demonstrations and, “out of politeness,” took out a passage about Bull Connor’s use of police dogs on marchers in 1963. Later in his career, Biden was criticized for exaggerating his civil rights era activism.

Not long after visiting Birmingham, Biden spoke out against a judicial appointment for then 39-year-old federal prosecutor Jeff Sessions. President Reagan’s nomination of the Alabama Republican was withdrawn in 1986 after allegations of racist remarks and behavior by Sessions were brought to light.

Sessions’ longtime assistant, Thomas Figures, who was Black, testified that Sessions repeatedly referred to him as “boy” and said Sessions talked about groups like the NAACP being “un-American” and “forc[ing] civil rights down the throats of people,” ABC News recalled when President Trump nominated Sessions for U.S. Attorney General 30 years later.

Thomas Figures’ nephew, Shomari Figures, is now the Democratic candidate in Alabama’s redrawn District 2 Congressional seat.

“Although such statements may have been in the privacy of his office or to individuals he considered to be friends and colleagues, they nevertheless are inappropriate for someone already holding a position of public trust and seeking a lifetime – I emphasize lifetime – judicial appointment,” Biden said in 1986, adding that he “can’t possibly” support Sessions’ nomination.

Coretta Scott King, widow of MLK, was also among those opposing Sessions’ nomination in 1986 for his role in prosecuting the so-called “Marion 3″ in a Perry County voting fraud case. Biden, then ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, had called for a “field investigation” into the case.

Sessions denied the allegations of racism and was elected to Heflin’s senate seat in 1996.

Biden has visited Alabama repeatedly since 1986, including a 2013 trip to Selma while vice president and a 2017 Birmingham campaign stop for Sen. Doug Jones, who succeeded Sessions in the senate and lost his re-election bid to former Auburn football coach Tommy Tuberville.

Biden also visited a visit a missile facility in Troy in 2022.