In Chicago, Sanders Found His Place in Civil Rights Movement (ABC News piece, amazingly)
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But it's clear Sanders was at least a local civil rights leader, taking action on campus and in Chicago neighborhoods at a time when such activities were primarily happening in the South, according to an Associated Press review of contemporaneous news coverage and interviews with former classmates of Sanders.
They recall a student who was serious-minded about politics, if not his studies, and inclined toward long discussions of public policy. He once wrote more than 1,500 words critical of campus rules forbidding students from having sex that filled a full page of the school newspaper.
He became active in the campus chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality after arriving in Chicago in the fall of 1961 and before the academic year ended was voted the group's chairman. In 1963, two weeks before Martin Luther King Jr.'s march on Washington, Sanders was arrested at a demonstration against segregation in Chicago schools.
"As far as whites go, he was in the top 1/1000th of 1 percent of people who acted, took it seriously and were willing to put themselves on the line," said Mike Parker, a former classmate who was arrested with Sanders and about 150 other protesters that day. Parker was released; Sanders and three others — described by prosecutors as having "engineered" the protests — were later fined $25 each, according to a 1964 Chicago Tribune article.
"It was just the beginning of the civil rights movement, and there were very few whites willing to stand up and take a chance, not only to speak of politics but to get arrested for it," added Parker, now 75 and an activist in California. "He was one of the few."
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THE REST:
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory/chicago-sanders-found-place-civil-rights-movement-37186915
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