What's Today? Thursday? OK, Here's Today's Bernie Lie [View all]

[72DejaVu]

In trying to establish the civil rights bona fides of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), many of his supporters have taken to posting a black-and-white photo of the presidential candidate from 1962. Students can been sitting on the floor and standing in the back as the then-dark-haired activist addresses them.


The compelling picture can be found in the senator’s biographical video on his campaign website. “At the University of Chicago,” Sanders says as the photo fades in and out, “I got involved in the civil rights movement. We ended up engaging in a sit-in demonstration.” It’s on the campaign’s Tumblr feed. “As the Civil Rights Movement grew, Bernie led a sit-in to desegregate off-campus housing at the University of Chicago,” reads the timeline under 1962. And Sanders used it in a stirring 2013 video to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington. “I remember the day very well and I remember the moment, the period well,” he says as the photo passes by, “because up at the University of Chicago, where I was then going to school, we were working with young people in the South.”


But that’s not Bernie Sanders in the photo. It is Bruce Rappaport.

Classmates of the two men started raising concerns about the discrepancy last year. According to Time, four University of Chicago alumni told the magazine in November that they believed the man to be Rappaport, also a student activist, who died in 2006. At the time of the story, the photo was still captioned as Bernie Sanders in the University of Chicago’s photo archive. But the picture’s caption has since been changed.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-partisan/wp/2016/02/11/stop-sending-around-this-photo-of-bernie-sanders/