Dear Lord, you do a great job making some long history of Bernie Sanders’ civil rights advocacy when there is very little. Sanders did not move to Chicago for any type of cause — he went there to attend college beginning in his sophomore year so he wasn’t a “mere teenager”, he was almost 23 when he graduated in 1964.

After college he spent a brief time in New York, some time at an Israeli kibbutz and then settled in Vermont where he talked a lot but did little else. When he became mayor of Burlington at age 40, it was his first full time, steady job. He had all the time in the world on his hands prior to becoming mayor to work for the civil rights cause but instead, he concentrated on preaching socialism and the greatness of Eugene Debs. Sanders wanted Debs’ story to be told to every school child and produced educational materials that he was never able to sell to any school districts with just reason: Eugene Debs was a bigot.

Debs loved to tell jokes in black dialect, and he failed to stand up for the rights of African-Americans in his early years as a union activist. Nick Salvatore, author of 1982’s “Eugene V. Debs; Citizen and Socialist,” writes that he supported keeping blacks out of jobs in the South, and he stood in favor of segregation on trains.

He also dismissed and insulted Italians, Chinese, Jews, and immigrants in general. “The most difficult problem Debs encountered centered on the issue of race and nationality,” Salvatore writes, because he definitively linked the labor movement to one group — Anglo-Saxon men.

But Debs did evolve on racial issues, at least to a degree. While some leaders of the Socialist Party were racists, Debs became convinced “that white workingmen would be exploited so long as the Negroes were held in an inferior position,” writes Ray Ginger in the 1949 biography “Bending Cross.” He stood up against some racism, but “refused to concede that poor Negroes were in a worse position than poor white people.”

National Journalist reporter Simon van Zuylen-Wood quoted Sanders in 2014: “Let me ask you, what is the largest voting bloc in America? Is it gay people? No. Is it African Americans? No. Hispanics? No. What?” Sanders answered his own question: “White working-class people.” That sounds a lot like Eugene Debs to me.

The black community in Burlington did NOT consider Sanders to be at all helpful & thought they were invisible to him. Perhaps you should speak to some of the community leaders there.

To take a year or two college activism and turn it into some lifetime achievement in civil rights is just ridiculous.