and his family struggled to pay for medical treatment, he was spending more time attending to her than in classes at Brooklyn College, suffering through what his brother called ‘a wrecked year’ leading to her death.” After that year, Sanders transferred from Brooklyn College to the University of Chicago. His father died almost immediately thereafter, in 1962.
Newly parentless, Sanders found his footing in Chicago just as the student and civil rights movements took center stage in the country’s politics. Student activists like him were important drivers of the upsurges of the sixties, joining the civil rights movement’s efforts to win voting rights and end Jim Crow, and fighting the Vietnam War. Bernie was “radicalized by the grinding poverty he saw for the first time in places such as the city’s South Side.” He later described his time in Chicago as “the major period of intellectual ferment in my life.”
Sanders joined the civil rights movement in Chicago. In 1962, as the president of his college’s chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), he led a sit-in at the University of Chicago. For thirteen days, student members of CORE occupied the university president’s office to demand the school end its policy of housing segregation in the off-campus buildings it owned. The administration agreed to create a committee to look into the issue, but according to Sanders at the time, this was not sufficient to resolve “an intolerable situation when Negro and white students of the university cannot live together in university-owned apartments.” CORE continued to pressure the university, picketing its buildings that refused to rent to African Americans.
In 1963, the University of Chicago finally gave in and ended its racist housing policy. But the struggles for racial justice in Chicago weren’t over. Months later, Sanders joined a protest against racist education policies in Chicago. Starved of public investment, crowded black schools were being supplied with temporary trailers to use as classrooms. Sanders went to protest the installation of these trailers and was arrested on the spot, his legs chained to those of black protesters. He was taken to jail, and bailed out by the NAACP. His arrest was captured by a photographer for the Chicago Sun-Times, his face in a grimace as police drag him away from the protest.
Later that year, Sanders traveled to Washington, DC, to attend the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.—Bernie’s other personal hero— gave his famous “I have a dream” speech. Many Americans remember the line from that speech about not judging people by the color of their skin but instead by the content of their character. Few remember that King praised the “marvelous new militancy which has engulfed the Negro community” and warned that “the whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright days of justice emerge.”
At the helm of key positions in the civil rights movement were socialists like A. Philip Randolph, who had cut his teeth in the Socialist Party and as the leader of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, and Bayard Rustin, whose activist life included stints in the antiwar movement, Communist Party, and Socialist Party. Even King called himself a democratic socialist. He had been recruited to the Montgomery Bus Boycott campaign by a labor organizer, E. D. Nixon, who had honed his politics and skills in the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. King’s final speech, the night before he was murdered, was delivered to Memphis sanitation workers who were on strike.
The socialist traditions of mass action and of struggle from below were also integral to the civil rights movement’s strategy. That movement overturned the white-supremacist Jim Crow order not simply by electing politicians sympathetic to civil rights (though it did that, too), but also by marching, getting arrested in civil disobedience actions, launching boycotts, and going on strike. Sanders’s participation in the most important American social movement of the twentieth century helped shape his views on the necessity of mass movements to win social change.
“My activities here in Chicago taught me a very important lesson that I have never forgotten,” Sanders said at a 2019 rally in front of 10,000 people in the city. “Real change never takes place from the top on down. It always takes place from the bottom on up.”
In Chicago, Sanders’s activities were not restricted to the civil rights movement. He also joined the Young People’s Socialist League (YPSL), the youth section of the Socialist Party. “It helped me put two and two together, in my mind,” Sanders said later about his time in the YPSL. “We don’t like poverty, we don’t like racism, we don’t like war, we don’t like exploitation. What do they all have in common? … What does wealth and power mean? How does it influence politics?”
This early experience with the socialist movement clearly made a deep impression—so deep that Sanders persisted in calling himself a socialist for the rest of his life, through all the decades during which the term was toxic. That persistence in claiming the socialist label led many to write him off as an eccentric over the years, but by refusing to give it up, Sanders helped popularize socialism decades later. His political steadfastness and stubbornness paid off.
When Sanders left the University of Chicago, he never rejoined a socialist group (though he did occasionally give speeches, for example, at Democratic Socialists of America conventions). But you can see the perspective he gained from joining that group stamped on his entire subsequent political career.
One thing Sanders inherited from the socialist tradition is a fundamental belief that the rich are not your friends, that we need to combat the wealthy and powerful rather than cozy up to them to make social change happen. Because a small number of elites benefit from our political and economic system as it is, Sanders believes they will never voluntarily give it up. The way to advance the interests of the vast majority is through conflict, not around it.
His rhetoric identifies social problems, then names the small group of powerful people who are creating those social problems, and says we have go to battle against them. That rhetoric stands in stark contrast to the dominant approach of the Democratic Party, even of its “progressive” wing, which is reticent about that need to name and shame and fight and dispossess the great hoarders of wealth in our society. Consider the difference between Sanders and the progressive 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren. She said on the Democratic Party presidential debate stage in 2019, “I don’t have a beef with billionaires,” before suggesting they “pitch in.” The Sanders campaign, by contrast, made bumper stickers emblazoned with the words “Billionaires should not exist.” Warren’s approach assumes that the ultra-rich can continue to exist without distorting our politics or immiserating wide swaths of the country. Sanders says the ultra-rich can’t stay ultra-rich.
While Sanders clearly thinks he has an important and unique role to play in the fight for a better world as a high-profile politician, he also constantly emphasizes that the election of one person, even one who has solid political and moral commitments to fight for the many, not the few, isn’t enough to change the world. To do that, we need a mass movement of working-class people. The power of the capitalist class is immense; to overcome it, we need to not just win elections but collectively assemble as millions of people marching in the street, engaging in strikes and boycotts, pressuring politicians, and pushing back against the inevitable retaliation for our victories. This is the socialist argument about how progressive change happens under capitalism: not through the independent actions of benevolent leaders, but by the working class coming together as a class and fighting for itself.
Could Sanders have developed this kind of analysis about the way change occurs under capitalism without joining a socialist organization and participating in a mass grassroots movement? It’s possible, but highly unlikely. Both endeavors give their members and participants a political education about how the world works and a base of experience in making that social change happen that is not found elsewhere. These experiences shaped Sanders’s conception of power in society and sharpened his clarity about which side he was on.
Against the Current
In
