Bernie Sanders praised segregationist George Wallace as ‘sensitive’ in 1972 – IOTW Report

Bernie Sanders praised segregationist George Wallace as ‘sensitive’ in 1972

Wa Examiner-

Seven years after Martin Luther King, Jr. referred to George Wallace as “perhaps the most dangerous racist in America today,” a young Bernie Sanders praised the segregationist Alabama governor.

In an interview with the Brattleboro Reformer in 1972, Sanders, then 31, said Wallace “advocates some outrageous approaches to our problems, but at least he is sensitive to what people feel they need.”

Sanders, now a Vermont senator and 2020 Democrat, said, “What we need are more active politicians working for the people.”

The 1972 remarks surprised the interviewer at the time, who wrote that “even though [Sanders] has been labeled a ‘leftist radical’ by some persons, Sanders had some praise for [Wallace].”

On other occasions, Sanders was more critical of Wallace and warned about the allure of white identity politics.

At the time, Sanders was in the midst of his first political bid, as a gubernatorial candidate for the socialist Liberty Union Party. During that race, Sanders garnered only single-digit support — the first in a series of losses in bids for political office, before winning the Burlington mayor’s office, Vermont’s single House seat in 1990, and his current Senate seat in 2006.

Wallace was among the most well-known segregationists of his era. Wallace declared in his 1963 inaugural address as governor — he served three different non-consecutive terms — that he stood for “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” Wallace won further infamy for standing in the front of the entrance of the University of Alabama, blocking the paths of black students.

He died in 1998 at 79, after becoming a born-again Christian and apologizing to black Americans for his previous policies.

The resurfacing of Sanders’s comments come after many Democrats begin fearing his rise in the presidential primary. For nearly a year, most of Sanders’s rivals have refrained from directly targeting his long paper trail of controversial statements and positions.

While there was a bipartisan consensus in the 1970s and 1980s against the totalitarian policies of the Soviet Union and Cuba, Sanders regularly touted what he saw as positive aspects of the regimes.
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6 Comments on Bernie Sanders praised segregationist George Wallace as ‘sensitive’ in 1972

  1. anyone find it curious that the ‘Washington Examiner’ & now ‘Trending News’ (thread about this one), 2 fairly conservative sites are getting these stories?

    … that the D’rats want exposed, because they don’t want Comrade Bernie to win the nomination!

    why are they carrying water for the D’rats?

    … just pausing to consider …

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  2. The “woke” assholes are doing the same thing now.

    At some point you have to fly the US Flag, or will not. Do you support The Constitution of the United States of America? In word and deed?

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  3. Every Goddamned major city has a monument to the most virulent racist/segregationist son of a bitch ever to hold the Presidency right there in Woodrow Wilson school. The duplicitous bastards worship this beast and his efforts to resegregate a federal workforce and military that had been largely desegregated under his predecessors, both Republican and Democrat.

    This is what Democrats are. This defines their sincerity on racial issues as horseshit.

    Black people mean nothing except a population to exploit to people who demand that young black people who want a public education in their own neighborhood must enter a building that honors his legacy in that effort.

    They have no concept of honor or dignity.

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  4. JDHasty did not come lately to this cause
    http://eagnews.org/districts-reject-requests-to-rename-schools-honoring-racist-and-segregationist-woodrow-wilson/
    https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2015/jul/29/tacoman-wants-spokanes-wilson-elementary-renamed/
    https://www.khq.com/news/tacoma-man-wants-spokane-s-wilson-elementary-renamed/article_12e780c2-bd1a-5336-8167-75e02a69bd5b.html

    Why, in 2019, does Tacoma have a public school named in honor of the most virulent segregationist/racist President in the last century?

    Living in a community that demands that black students are left with only the Hobbseian choice between attending a school named in honor of one of, if not the most virulent segregationist Presidents in the last 150 years, that is located right in their own neighborhood, or going elsewhere if they wish to attend public school, is not just wrong, it is obscene.

    I find forcing that choice on families of black students to be demeaning, degrading and unacceptable.

    I have repeatedly brought this to the attention of the editors and senior staff of this paper. Woodrow Wilson’s virulent racist/segregationist legacy is well documented and in 2019 having a public school named in Wilson’s honor is a scandal and a disgrace.

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  5. I went to Wilson Elementary school on Spokane’s South hill way back in first grade in 1959. The school is still there currently undergoing a major remodel since it is one of the oldest elementary schools in Spokane built back in the 1920’s. I wonder if they still have the troughs for urinals that they had when I was in first grade. And I remember them segregating the boys and the girls by having a boys side to the playground and a girls side as well. And it was where Mrs. Hamburger thought I was retarded because I couldn’t learn to read using the damned look/say Dick & Jane books. Fortunately for me she became pregnant and had to take a leave of absence and my next teacher and my mom taught me to read phonetically. Spokane at the time was almost white so there were no black kids there when I was in first grade.

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  6. Good ole Woodrow… “Wilson is widely and correctly remembered — and represented in our history books — as a progressive Democrat who introduced many liberal reforms at home and fought for the extension of democratic liberties and human rights abroad. ” … just so long as the Negroes are kept in their place… away from us!

    For over half a century our run-down, shot-up, burned-out, poverty-stricken, crime-ridden, rat-infested, urine-soaked, feces-friendly, Big Shit-Hole cities, run by democRATs, have been dividing Black people with fabricated “Racism”, promoting open boarders, breadlines, hate hoaxes, fake Indians, women-beaters, crooks and pedophiles while selling them all Hope & Change® Snake Oil at election time! It is a living testimony to the fact that the so-called “Progressive DemocRAT” just hasn’t really changed much!

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