A Chicago Tribune archival photo of a young man being arrested in 1963 at a South Side protest shows Democratic presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders, his campaign has confirmed, bolstering the candidate’s narrative about his civil rights activism.
The black-and-white photo shows a 21-year-old Sanders, then a University of Chicago student, being taken by Chicago police toward a police wagon. An acetate negative of the photo was found in the Tribune’s archives, said Marianne Mather, a Chicago Tribune photo editor.
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“Bernie identified it himself,” said Tad Devine, a senior adviser to the campaign, adding that Sanders looked at a digital image of the photo. “He looked at it — he actually has his student ID from the University of Chicago in his wallet — and he said, ‘Yes, that indeed is (me).'” Sanders, a U.S. senator from Vermont, was traveling Friday near Reno, Nev., on the eve of the state’s Democratic presidential caucuses.
Sanders’ activism at the University of Chicago has been in the news recently, after questions arose about a different photo that appeared to show Sanders addressing students at a 1962 campus sit-in. At first, several alumni identified the speaker as another man, according to the University of Chicago Library’s Special Research Center. The other man is no longer alive.
However, photographer Danny Lyon, who took that photo, contacted the research center and made available more photos from the same sequence, confirming Sanders’ identity, the center said.
Devine called those questions about the sit-in photo “unfair and unfounded.”
“His activism and when it occurred, as a young college student, set in motion the direction of his life,” Devine said.
After the 1962 photos surfaced, Mather and photographer Brian Nguyen looked in the newspaper’s archival collection and found several negatives that appeared to be Sanders.
The subjects of the photographs were not listed on the negatives, but information filed with them indicated that the Tribune arrest photo was taken in August 1963 near South 73rd Street and Lowe Avenue, which is in the Englewood neighborhood.
A January 1964 Tribune story on the court cases of those who had been arrested in August identified a Bernard Sanders. The negatives were scanned and an image was shown to the Sanders campaign Friday. On Saturday, the campaign confirmed that a second photo also shows Sanders.
In the early 1960s, protests over segregation in the Englewood area raged over mobile classrooms dubbed “Willis Wagons,” named for then-Chicago Schools Superintendent Benjamin Willis. Critics charged that the trailers kept black children in the area instead of sending them to white schools.
Sanders was arrested Aug. 12, 1963, and charged with resisting arrest. He was found guilty and fined $25, according to a Tribune story about the protests.
Sanders enrolled at the University of Chicago on Oct. 3, 1960, and graduated in June 1964 with a bachelor of arts degree in political science, said Jeremy Manier, a university spokesman.
Sanders attended Brooklyn College before coming to the U. of C., Manier said.
At the University of Chicago, he was a leader of the Congress of Racial Equality, a major civil rights group. News accounts from the time had Sanders leading protests over racial inequality.
Twitter @Katherine Skiba
