The death of Tom Hayden — the iconic anti-war and civil rights activist, who was perhaps the most recognizable face of the New Left in the 1960s — represents a great loss to all who believe in social justice.
I first met Tom in Mississippi almost six years ago, during the 50th anniversary reunion of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, pronounced “snick”). The legendary civil rights group inspired Hayden to pen the Port Huron Statement, one of the founding documents of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). At 70 years old, Hayden was fit, intellectually vibrant and displayed the energy and enthusiasm for political activism of someone half his age.
In person, Tom proved to be an extraordinary raconteur, teacher and intellectual. He was humble and unassuming. His charisma revealed itself slowly, over the course of mesmerizing conversation that would leave you hungry for more. Over a group dinner, we discussed the civil rights movement, the prospects for political radicalism in the Age of Obama, and his friendship with Black Power leader Stokely Carmichael, whose biography I was writing at the time.
In phone conversations and meetings over the next several years, I found Tom to be nothing less than extraordinary. From his base in California, Tom continued to fight for racial, economic and environmental justice for marginalized communities across the nation and around the world.
Contrasting the clichéd efforts to divide the civil rights era in to the “good 1960s” vs. the “bad 1960s,” he came to view this time holistically, even as his prodigious writings delved into the trauma suffered by generations of idealistic activists. Deeply concerned with issues of economic injustice, Tom developed relationships with civil rights activists like Martin Luther King Jr., Carmichael and local black activists in Newark that helped him to recognize the central role of race in American history.
Two years ago, Tom and I participated in a dialogue about Stokely Carmichael at Eso Won Books in Los Angeles. In blurbing my just published biography, Tom characterized Stokely as an activist who “opened our dying culture to new possibilities of freedom” and our conversation expounded on this theme.
Perhaps more than any white radical political activist of his generation Tom Hayden publicly and privately acknowledged the debt owed to the black freedom struggle, wrestled with the role of whites in racial justice movements and thoughtfully articulated how coalition politics might work in a multicultural society.
Our conversation in Los Angeles that day centered on black political radicalism, a subject that Tom could speak about with uncommon knowledge, humor and grace. He proudly recalled being referred to, by critics at the time, as the “white Stokely Carmichael,” a statement that elicited both laughter and cheers.
On a more serious note, Tom recounted his vicious beating at the hands of local authorities in Mississippi in 1961, working in Newark, New Jersey, on anti-poverty programs in the mid ’60s and organizing protests alongside black activists at the 1968 Democratic National Convention.
But Tom did not stop there. He remained, until the end of his life, intensely interested in contemporary social justice movements, especially those with an anti-racism component. As a young man and University of Michigan student, Tom found inspiration in the struggle for black dignity being waged by university students and sharecroppers. He dove headfirst into the movement, risking his personal safety to put his body on the line, the highest marker of political integrity for student activists in the wake of the Greensboro, North Carolina, lunch sit-ins.
Tom Hayden remained, over the next 55 years of his life, true to his youthful belief that humanity grew through struggle. Tom mentored countless young people eager to tap into his vast reservoir of movement and organizing experience, shared his memories, knowledge, and personal experience about the 1960s with students, teachers, professors and activists, and lectured around the country and world about the possibilities for freedom long after the heyday of the 1960s had past.
The obituaries invariably mention his marriage to movie star Jane Fonda, his trips to Hanoi, North Vietnam, during the height of the war, and his many political campaigns for elected office in California. Hayden did, for a time, embody aspects of the down-to-earth glamor of the radical 1960s, when an Irish-American college student turned political revolutionary could meet and marry an Oscar winning actress.
But Tom Hayden’s story is so much more.
Tom’s biggest legacy, one that contemporary social justice advocates should never forget, is believing in the transformational power of grassroots political struggle — the way ordinary, everyday people could change the world. Tom never abandoned SNCC’s credo of bringing people of all colors, backgrounds, and beliefs to come and “build a new world.”
He became one of the few living Americans who participated — with great integrity — in a range of social movements of the era, the rare figure who could engage in compelling dialogue with black sharecroppers, peace activists, Black Panthers, movie stars and elected officials.
“Democracy,” Tom famously said in Chicago in 1968, “is in the streets,” and he made it his life’s mission to be as close to this political action as possible. While some in his generation lost hope, Tom never abandoned faith in the belief that a new world is possible.
In the end, Tom became more than just an icon of the 1960s New Left and former SDS president. Like the political figures he most admired, Tom became a human rights activist whose legacy lives on even in death and who I am proud to have been able to call a friend.