"Sanders is a lot of things, many of them good," Coates wrote afterward. "But he is not the candidate of moderation and unification, so much as the candidate of partisanship and radicalism." | Getty Writer Ta-Nehisi Coates says he's voting for Sanders

The influential African-American author Ta-Nehisi Coates says he's voting for Bernie Sanders.

Coates, a staff writer at The Atlantic who is the author of “Between the World and Me,” a memoir about being black in the United States, told Democracy Now! that he supports Sanders despite the Vermont senator's position on reparations for slavery — the subject of a provocative 2014 cover story by Coates.


At Iowa's Black and Brown Forum in January, Sanders dismissed the idea of reparations for slavery as “very divisive” and said he preferred to make "massive investments in rebuilding our cities" and "targeting our federal resources to ... impoverished communities, often African-American and Latino."

Speaking at the same forum, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton also said she doesn’t support reparations.

"Sanders is a lot of things, many of them good," Coates wrote afterward. "But he is not the candidate of moderation and unification, so much as the candidate of partisanship and radicalism."

But on Wednesday, Coates told Democracy Now's Amy Goodman that he was “pleasantly stunned” by Sanders' candidacy, “but I think it’s awesome.”

As for Clinton, he said was "very concerned" about her record, and said she was in favor of "disgusting" legislation on criminal justice during the 1990s.