Source: NBC News
COLUMBIA, S.C. — Bernie Sanders and Cory Booker both marked Martin Luther King Day at the same event here Monday, but highlighted very different parts of his legacy as both senators prepare for contrasting presidential campaigns.
Sanders, a Vermont independent, tore into President Donald Trump, calling him a “racist” who foments bigotry.
He connected his trademark economic populism and call for a “political revolution” to the struggle for racial justice and King’s own campaigns for economic equality.“King had a revolutionary spirit. Yes, he was a revolutionary,” Sanders said in front of the South Carolina State House dome at an event organized by the NAACP. “Combating racial equality must be central to combating economic inequality.”
Sanders noted that King was in Memphis, Tennessee to support a strike by sanitation workers when he was assassinated, and that he protested the Vietnam War, even though “many of his liberal friends” and “editorial writer after editorial writer deserted him” over it.
Booker, a young African-American Democrat from New Jersey, wore no coat despite an unusual cold snap that sent temperatures into the 30s — “I’m layered,” he explained — and made easy connections with the overwhelmingly black crowd that came to shake his hand and listen to him speak.
“You make a Jersey boy feel like he’s home,” Booker said after the taking the stage. “A third of the black folk up in Newark are from South Carolina, so I know I’m at home.”
Booker, one…
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