Democratic presidential hopeful’s campaign confirms that it is the Vermont senator when he was 21 being arrested by two police officers in 1963

This article is more than 4 years old

This article is more than 4 years old

Footage has emerged that appears to show Bernie Sanders being arrested during a civil rights protest in Chicago in 1963.

John Lewis: I did not mean to 'disparage' Bernie Sanders' civil rights activism Read more

A documentary company, Kartemquin Films, this week published footage online showing two police officers arresting a young student wearing thick-rimmed glasses, resembling those still worn by the Vermont senator and Democratic presidential candidate.

The Chicago Tribune then unearthed from its archive a photograph and a story that noted “Bernard Sanders, 21” as having been among the people arrested and fined at the protest.

“Bernie identified [the photograph] himself,” Tad Devine, a senior Sanders adviser, told the Tribune. “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].”

As the Democratic contest has shifted to the south and west, the civil rights movement, in its past and present generations, has taken center stage. In Nevada, where more than a quarter of the population is Hispanic, caucusers will choose whether to deliver candidates to Sanders or Hillary Clinton on Saturday. A week later, the two candidates for the Democratic nomination will face off in South Carolina, where more than a quarter of the population is black.



Despite the success of an insurgent campaign that has seen him finish in a virtual tie in Iowa and an emphatic win in New Hampshire, Sanders has struggled to quickly win over black and Hispanic voters.

This week, Sanders met prominent black Americans, and the daughter of Eric Garner, whose death prompted protests in New York, joined him on the campaign trail. Clinton meanwhile won the endorsement of major figures of the civil rights movement, and also met with community leaders in Harlem. One of the leaders who endorsed her, the Georgia congressman John Lewis, last week appeared to question Sanders’ involvement in the civil rights movement.

“I never saw him,” Lewis said at a press conference. “I never met him.”

A famous leader with the Freedom Riders of 1961, the 1963 March on Washington and marches in Selma, Alabama in 1965, Lewis later downplayed his remarks about Sanders, saying he did not mean “to disparage his activism”.

“The fact that I did not meet him in the movement does not mean I doubted that Senator Sanders participated in the civil rights movement,” Lewis said. “Neither was I attempting to disparage his activism.

“Thousands sacrificed in the 1960s whose names we will never know, and I have always given honor to their contribution.”