Shortly before (or after) Bernie Sanders announced his candidacy for President of the United States, I read this wonderful profile of Sanders in The University of Chicago magazine.
Rick Perlstein’s piece is a simple, evocative, and very moving profile of Senator Sanders, his activities and studies at The University of Chicago. I especially liked Perlstein’s…uhm, interesting analysis of the impression that Mayor Richard Daley the First made on the young Bernie Sanders:
It wasn’t long before he was called to meet with a dean. “He thought I needed to focus more on my academics.” He took a year off, working around the city. His jobs included one with the United Automobile Union. He also worked on the 1963 reelection of Leon Despres, PhB’27, JD’29,who supported the students’ housing protest, to his seat on the City Council. Mayor Richard J. Daley had marked Despres for political execution for his independence and quixotic fight against the regular Democratic machine. “I was very impressed by Richard J. Daley’s Chicago machine,” Sanders says, singling out how Daley’s patronage machine maintained “a city worker for every 200 voters.” Call it a political education, Chicago-style.
Though the idealistic Sanders might never admit it, when he was elected mayor of Burlington in 1981 by 10 votes after a decade spent unsuccessfully running for various state offices in Vermont, something in the Daley lesson must have taken. There are certain things about how a machine like Daley’s amasses power that are useful to learn for any municipal politician. Namely, that you have to deliver the goods. “What’s inherently wrong with the word ‘politician,’” Daley once asked, “if the fellow has devoted his life to holding public office and trying to do something for his people?” It’s the dirty, gritty business of giving voters something for their votes—making the system work for people.
Between Perlstein’s profile and Mark Leibovich’s 2007 profile of Sanders in The New York Times Magazine, I had all of the information on Sanders’ background and his civil rights history that I’ve really deemed necessary. The Mother Jones piece on this is also pretty good.
And then the summer of “he marched with King” and endless spam on how much Bernie loved black folks came to pass...with heavy editorializing and drop-in mentions of how much of a bitch that Hillary Clinton was (and is) to black people.
I mean, it’s not as if Bernie Sanders was the only white guy that fought for black civil rights nor was Bernie Sanders the only white guy in SNCC and related organizations. Far from it.
Dear nice white progressives: White history is fucked up as it is; don’t come and attempt to rewrite black history to suit your purposes.
There is no systemic attempt by black people or Hillary Clinton or David Brock to excise Bernie Sanders name from black history books.
Black people have always written and talked of good honest white folk that we knew of and their accomplishments for black people.
The real thing is this: Please don’t attempt to browbeat black people (and of all people, John Lewis) into how important and vital Sanders’ civil rights activities were: Sanders’ history is admittedly impressive and, as someone else stated, it’s rather nice that we now have one more known face of the movement...so many more faces remain unknown.
But Sanders has never drawn that much attention to it and neither should you.
Be honest and admit that it’s not so much whether black folk are as impressed by it as you are, acknowledge instead that you are impressed with his history.
Frankly, I find Sanders’ civil rights activities every bit as impressive as Hillary Clinton’s work with the Children’s Defense Fund or Clinton’s work on Senator Walter Mondale’s subcommittee on migrant workers.
In varied degrees, both Senator Sanders and Secretary Clinton have moved on.
And so should the rest of us.