Has video surfaced of Bernie Sanders 1963 arrest?

Feb 16, 2016 14:34

image You can watch this video on www.livejournal.com



On August 5, 1963, Jerry Temaner was a young filmmaker on location of the growing protest movement emerging in Chicago. On the South Side of the city, in a community called Englewood, black families were coming together to boycott the proposed "construction" of a new school on the corner of 73rd & Lowe. The plan, which sounds just as ridiculous today as it likely did 53 years ago, was to build the entire school out of a collection of mobile homes called Willis Wagons.

As expected, families in the community weren't having it and the protests on the proposed site where the mobile homes would be placed were fierce. Of course, nobody there had any idea that one of the young men in their midst, protesting the racism among schools and housing on the South Side, was a man who would one day run for President, Bernie Sanders.


As a student at the nearby University of Chicago, Sanders served as chapter president of the Congress for Racial Equality at the university. A Chicago Tribune press clipping from August of 1963 shows that during a protest, right there on the corner where the mobile homes were being placed, Bernie Sanders was charged with resisting arrest and taken to jail. This isn't conjecture or revisionist history. Bernie Sanders was a student activist and was arrested during this protest.

Now, it appears obscure archival footage filmed on that very day by Temaner, one of the co-founders of Kartemquin Films, a legendary documentary film company in Chicago, shows the arrest of a young Bernie Sanders.

This isn't just the random happenstance of a guy who looks eerily similar to Sanders being arrested in some random place that had nothing to do with his proven activism. This is a young man, resisting arrest, on the day Bernie was arrested, where he was arrested, who looks just like every other image we have of Bernie from the time.

At a time where surrogates for Hillary Clinton seem to be questioning whether or not Sanders was active in the Civil Rights Movement or ever even cared about issues that matter to black folk, we continue to see more and more evidence that the very identity of Senator Sanders was forged in the fire of activism. Not one other presidential candidate can say such a thing.

Recently, the revered photographer Danny Lyon came forward to confirm that disputed photos of Bernie Sanders during the movement absolutely were of Sanders. Lyon also released additional photos never seen until now. On his own blog, Lyon says:

"In 1962 and the spring of 1963 I was the student photographer at the University of Chicago, making pictures for the yearbook, the Alumni Magazine and the student paper, The Maroon. By the summer of 1962 I had taken my camera into the deep South, and become the first photographer for SNCC.

That winter at the University of Chicago, there was a sit-in inside the administration building protesting discrimination against blacks in university-owned housing. I went to it with a CORE activist and friend. The sit in was in a crowded hallway, blocking the entrance to the office of Dr. George Beadle, the chancellor.

I took the photograph of Bernie Sanders speaking to his fellow CORE members at that sit-in. Bob McNamara, a close friend and CORE activist, is in the very corner next to me in the picture. Across the room from me is another campus photographer named Wexler, who taught me how to develop film.

I photographed Bernie a second time after he got a haircut, as he appeared next to the noble laureate and chancellor Dr. George Beadle. Time Magazine is now claiming it is not Bernie in the picture but someone else. It is Bernie, and it is proof of his very early dedication to justice for African-Americans. The CORE sit-in that Bernie helped lead was the first civil rights sit-in to take place in the North."

Indeed, these now fully confirmed photographs of a young Bernie Sanders show a young man who cared deeply about justice and equality. Not only that, they fully match the newly released video of the young man being arrested.

It's sad, and a true state of our political climate, that any of this was ever called into question in the first place.

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So-- is it him? Not gonna lie, maybe it's my natural inner-rebel, but I think it'd be cool to have a president whose on film refusing arrest, lol.

oh shit the internet is here, protest, bernie sanders, election 2016, police, housing, activism, america fuck yeah, presidential candidates

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