Bernie Sanders was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2006 after serving 16 years in the House of Representatives. He is the longest-serving independent member of Congress in American history. Born in 1941 in Brooklyn, Bernie was the younger of two sons in a modest-income family. After graduating from the University of Chicago in 1964, he moved to Vermont. Early in his career, Sanders was the American People's Historical Society director. Elected Mayor of Burlington by ten votes in 1981, he served four terms. Before his 1990 election as Vermont's at-large member in Congress, Sanders lectured at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and Hamilton College in upstate New York. Minerva Diaz met Bernie Sanders when she was invited backstage at one of his speaking engagements in NYC, where he signed her original work of his likeness.