Bernie Sanders found his place in the Chicago civil-rights movement

Bernie Sanders was in his first year at the University of Chicago, 20 and with a thick New York accent, when he took to the steps of the administration building to rail against a university policy of racially segregated housing.

"We feel it is an intolerable situation, when Negro and white students of the university cannot live together in university-owned apartments," Sanders told a crowd of about 200 students that afternoon in January 1962.

Then he and a few dozen students headed to the fifth floor, where they began a 15-day sit-in outside the university president's office, passing their time reading and eating dinners of donated cheese and salami sandwiches.