Bernie Sanders has a Black Lives Matter problem, and it doesn’t look like it’s going away anytime soon.

Sanders makes an appealing target for the grass-roots movement — the surging presidential candidate has been drawing monster crowds on the campaign trail, giving protesters high-impact moments when they disrupt his events. And the activists say that since he holds himself out as the most progressive candidate, he is the logical champion for their cause.


But for Sanders, the headlines of hijacked events risk casting further doubt that the self-described democratic socialist can make it all the way to the White House.

While he’s been winning over crowds with his fiery message of income inequality, minority voters aren’t biting.

In late July, a Gallup poll showed that only 25 percent of nonwhite Democratic or Democratic-leaning voters view Sanders favorably, compared with 80 percent for front-runner Hillary Clinton.

Despite his history as a young radical promoting the civil rights movement in the 1960s, Sanders is struggling to shake his persona of a 73-year-old white guy from Vermont, a state that is 95 percent white.

“This is something that the Sanders campaign is going to have to solve because it’s going to be problematic if he has any chance of winning the nomination,” Democratic strategist and pollster Cornell Belcher said. “Because the truth is if you can’t compete and win black votes in a Democratic primary, you are not going to be the Democratic nominee. If you can’t compete for black voters this means you can’t win South Carolina, you can’t win NC, you can’t win GA, you can’t win Louisiana, you can’t win Mississippi.”

So far, the Black Lives Matter movement, which gained momentum during a series of shootings of unarmed black men by white police officers, has interrupted two major Sanders events, demanding that he more directly take on issues related to institutional racism in housing, education and criminal justice.

On Saturday, Sanders was awkwardly driven off the stage at a Social Security Works event in Seattle by activists who demanded to address the crowd about police brutality against African-Americans. He tried to regain the microphone, but ultimately had to leave the stage in the confusion.

Sanders spokesman Michael Briggs declined to talk overall about the incident or Sanders’ plan to address the growing impact of the movement. He did say, though, that the campaign had little control over Saturday’s event.

“It wasn’t our event. He was the last of many speakers,” Briggs said.

Activists from the group say that it’s not anything personal against Sanders.

“It’s not that we’re targeting him specifically,” California State University-Los Angeles professor Melina Abdullah, one of the leaders and an organizer of the Black Lives Matter chapter in Los Angeles said of Sanders. “I think it’s just really important to understand that these things didn’t happen because there’s some grand plan. It just so happened to pan out that way that Sanders has been on the receiving end twice.”

Abdullah said there’s no candidate on the Republican or Democratic side of the 2016 cycle who has made racial injustice or police brutality against African-Americans “a centerpiece of the campaign.”

Another Democratic strategist who’s worked with activists in the Black Lives Movement, and asked for anonymity to speak candidly, said white progressives such as Sanders serve up liberal rhetoric but do little to tackle the more insidious forms of racism in this country.

It also helps the protesters that Sanders is drawing huge crowds in mostly liberal strongholds like Madison, Wisconsin or Seattle — something Clinton is not doing.

“Her events are not commanding 18, 15, 24,000 people in these ultraliberal places,” the strategist said.

While Sanders took a passive approach during the weekend disruption and a prior one at the Netroots Nation conference in Arizona last month, he hasn’t been ignoring the activists’ concerns or minority outreach.

A week before the conference, the Sanders campaign installed Marcus Ferrell as African-American outreach coordinator. After the conference, where Sanders became visibly frustrated trying to direct his answers back to income inequality and economic issues, he made sure his social media messages were stocked with mentions of the topics the Black Lives Matter protesters were referring to.

“We want a nation where young black men and women can live without fear of being falsely arrested, beaten or killed #blacklivesmatter,” Sanders wrote in one tweet a day after the Netroots forum. He continued: “Sandra Bland, Eric Garner, Freddie Gray and too many others.”

Sanders’ campaign also announced on Saturday that it had brought on African-American activist Symone Sanders, who has been a volunteer organizer with the Coalition of Juvenile Justice, as its national press secretary.

The campaign wasted no time in highlighting her support of the presidential candidate. Symone Sanders introduced him Saturday night before a crowd of 12,000 people at an event at the University of Washington. On Sunday night, she again introduced Sanders, telling the roughly 28,000-strong crowd, “I have some good information that says there might be a little disruption tonight. So, I wanna be very clear. This campaign is about bringing people together. If there happens to be a disruption tonight, I want everyone in this stadium to respond with a chant.”

She guided them to yell, “We! Stand! Together!”

Abdullah said there were no immediate plans for the next disruption of a presidential event. As far as what the movement wants to hear, she said it’s as simple as making black lives a real priority in their campaigns.

“I think that there’s also an opportunity on the Sanders side — when the Black Lives Matters activists came to the stage he had an opportunity to say ‘in my presidency there’s going to be a place for black people on the stage,’” Abdullah said. “I think that’s what all candidates need to take from this.”