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.
And last year, the Washington Examiner reported on Sanders’s history campaigning for the Marxist Socialist Workers party in 1980 and 1984. At one point, Sanders’s involvement with the SWP led to an FBI investigation when he was mayor of Burlington, Vermont.
Never an official member of the Democratic Party until his presidential bids in 2016 and 2020, many primary voters view his presidential bids with suspicion.
Sanders never endorsed a Democratic presidential candidate until 1988, when he first had his eyes on federal office. That year, he backed Jesse Jackson. Sanders was first elected to Congress as an independent in 1990 after a failed House bid two years earlier.
In other writings, Sanders expressed concern about the racist fervor of Wallace’s supporters.
“I came away from these Wallace interviews with two basic feelings. First, that democracy in America (in any sense of the word) just might not make it,” Sanders wrote in 1972. “My mind flashed to scenes of Germany in the late 1920’s. Confusion, rebellion, frustration, economic instability, a wounded national pride, ineffectual political leadership — and the desire for a strong man who would do something, who would bring order out of the chaos.”
The interview and subsequent writings demonstrate the balancing act many on the left faced when dealing with segregationists.
Despite his rivals attempting to capitalize on Sanders’s past, other Democratic White House hopefuls have their own racial-tinged history to grapple with.
In 1975, then-Delaware Sen. Joe Biden told the Philadelphia Enquirer that “the Democratic Party could stand a liberal George Wallace.”
The following year, however, Biden vowed not to back Wallace should he win the Democratic Party’s nomination.
“If Wallace got the [Democratic nomination], I would support the Republican nominee, if it were Gerald Ford,” said Biden, then 34 and in the fourth year of his 36-year Senate career, which preceded two terms as President Barack Obama’s vice president.
In 1974, Biden also pledged to stop Wallace from winning the nomination in the next presidential race.
“Over my dead political body is George Wallace going to get it,” Biden said.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to include other comments Sanders made about Wallace.
