Early Life
A Brooklyn childhood, a Chicago education, and the civil-rights movement — the making of Bernie Sanders before Vermont.
Brooklyn, 1941–1959
Bernard Sanders was born September 8, 1941, in Brooklyn, New York, the second son of Eli Sanders — a Polish immigrant who sold paint — and Dorothy (Glassberg) Sanders. The family lived in a rent-controlled apartment in the Midwood neighborhood. His older brother Larry later became a British-based politician and Green Party activist.
Sanders attended James Madison High School, where he was captain of the track team. Classmates and biographers have described a studious, argumentative teenager already drawn to political debate.
College and the civil-rights movement
Sanders enrolled at Brooklyn College in 1959, then transferred to the University of Chicago, where he earned a B.A. in political science in 1964. Chicago radicalized him: he joined the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and worked with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). A photograph held by the University of Chicago archives shows Sanders being arrested at a 1963 protest against segregation in Chicago public schools. In August 1963 he attended the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.
In 1963 he also spent time on a kibbutz in Israel — a biographical detail his Senate office has confirmed.
The 1960s after graduation
After graduating in 1964, Sanders held a string of jobs — carpenter, freelance writer, filmmaker — and was briefly married to Deborah Shiling (1964–1966). His son Levi was born in 1969. In 1968 he moved to Vermont, buying land in the Northeast Kingdom and settling near Burlington, drawn by the state’s rural character and independent political culture.
The Liberty Union years (1971–1977)
Sanders’s first campaigns were run under the banner of the Liberty Union Party, a small Vermont progressive party. He ran for governor in 1972 and 1976 and for the U.S. Senate in 1972 and 1974, losing each time — sometimes with only a few percent of the vote. The losses were formative: he later described learning the mechanics of campaigning and the limits of third-party bids in a two-party system.
Source notes
Biographical details here come from the official Senate press-package biography and from contemporaneous university and press records cited on the sources page. Family details are limited to what is publicly documented.
Factual baseline: September 2026.