NEWS > HISTORY
Today in Chicago History: Bernie Sanders — then a University of Chicago student — arrested during South Side protest



Chicago police officers carry Bernie Sanders, 21, to a police wagon from a civil rights demonstration at West 73rd Street and South Lowe Avenue in August 1963. He was charged with resisting arrest, found guilty and fined $25. He was a University of Chicago student at the time. (Tom Kinahan/Chicago Tribune)

By KORI RUMORE | krumore@chicagotribune.com | Chicago Tribune
PUBLISHED: August 12, 2025 at 4:00 AM CDT

Here’s a look back at what happened in the Chicago area on Aug. 12, according to the Tribune’s archives.

{snip national Negro Day}



University of Chicago student Bernie Sanders was arrested Aug. 12, 1963, and charged with resisting arrest. He was found guilty and fined $25, according to a Tribune story. (Chicago Tribune)

1963: University of Chicago student Bernie Sanders, then 21, was charged with resisting arrest during an Aug. 12, 1963 demonstration in Englewood — along with comedian Dick Gregory and 54 others — against the use of mobile classrooms in the city’s public schools.

Chicago Public Schools Superintendent Benjamin Willis refused to allow Black children to be bused from their crowded neighborhood schools to those in white areas with more resources. That’s why the portable classroom trailers were nicknamed “Willis wagons” and became symbolic of the city’s long struggle over segregated education. ... Demonstrations against Willis wagons were a precursor to a more sweeping Civil Rights Movement in Chicago that drew the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. to the city in 1966 — the same year Willis resigned.

Mobile classrooms began to be phased out of Chicago schools in the 1970s, but photographic proof of Sanders’ participation in the 1963 Englewood protest wouldn’t be discovered in the Tribune archives until decades later — when he was a Democratic presidential hopeful.