Senator Bernie Sanders, a candidate for the Democratic presidential nominee, features the above photos in the campaign ad Progress as evidence of his contributions to civil rights. While no one doubts that Sanders participated in the civil rights movement, many have argued that the person featured in the above photos is Bruce Rappaport instead of Bernie Sanders. In fact, an article from the Washington Post claims:
But that’s not Bernie Sanders in the photo. It is Bruce Rappaport.
Classmates of the two men started raising concerns about the discrepancy last year. According to Time, four University of Chicago alumni told the magazine in November that they believed the man to be Rappaport, also a student activist, who died in 2006. At the time of the story, the photo was still captioned as Bernie Sanders in the University of Chicago’s photo archive. But the picture’s caption has since been changed.
“Alumni who knew them well said that was Bruce Rappaport [pictured],” a University of Chicago official told me Wednesday. The caption was changed in January. “This was just a case of honest misattribution,” the official told me.
The photographer (Danny Lyon) that took the image supported Senator Sanders claim in a different article by the Washington Post:
That’s Bernie Sanders.
Yet the same article also lists the ex-wife (Randy Ross) of Bruce Rappaport as saying:
I’m a hundred percent sure that Danny is wrong.
So who is truly the person featured in the above photos?