Tom Hayden

Tom Hayden (born December 11, 1939, Royal Oak, Michigan, U.S.—died October 23, 2016, Santa Monica, California) was an American activist and author. One of the preeminent activists of the 1960s, Hayden helped found Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and was arrested as one of the Chicago Seven indicted for conspiracy to incite the riots that accompanied the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago.

Hayden attended the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where he served as editor of The Michigan Daily. In 1960 Hayden, along with other activists such as Michael Harrington and Robert Alan Haber, founded SDS, an offshoot of the League for Industrial Democracy and the Intercollegiate Socialist Society. He also served as a Freedom Rider in the South, struggling for the civil rights of African Americans. In 1962 his work The Port Huron Statement became the political manifesto for SDS, calling on students to use nonviolent means to develop a participatory democracy in the United States, especially for African American voters in the South. He served as president of SDS from 1962 to 1963. From 1964 to 1968 he worked in Newark, New Jersey, with the Newark Community Union Project, a local community group that assisted impoverished inner-city residents. During that time Hayden observed the city’s race riots and penned Rebellion in Newark: Official Violence and Ghetto Response (1967) in response.

As the American presence in Vietnam escalated, Hayden began organizing civil disobedience protests against the Vietnam War. In 1965 he made the first of many trips to Vietnam, including a controversial 1972 trip to Hanoi with his future wife, Jane Fonda. In 1968 Hayden played an integral part in the protests at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, eventually being beaten, gassed, and arrested with Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, and others as part of the Chicago Seven, who were charged with conspiracy, impeding police officers, teaching other protesters how to make incendiary devices, and crossing state lines to incite a riot. After five years in the judicial system, Hayden was acquitted on all counts.

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In the mid-1970s the California political system opened to citizen activist groups and began allowing grassroots-led ballot propositions. With Fonda, Hayden founded the Campaign for Economic Democracy (CED), which helped to defeat the building of a nuclear power plant through a referendum, to pass Proposition 65 of 1986 to require labels on carcinogenic products, and to develop and pass Proposition 99 to fund public health and antitobacco initiatives.

Hayden also entered electoral politics, beginning with a primary challenge against California’s U.S. Sen. John Tunney in 1976. A Democrat, Hayden served in the California State Assembly from 1982 to 1992 and the State Senate from 1992 to 2000. He promoted legislation to deal with equity in the public university system, environmental measures such as the banning of methyl tertiary butyl ether (MTBE) in drinking water and the drafting of the largest environmental restoration bond in California history, and the training of immigrant parents of public-school children. Hayden endured two Republican-led expulsion hearings during his tenure in the California state legislature for his “traitorous” acts during the Vietnam War. After leaving the legislature, he worked on protest campaigns against the Afghanistan and Iraq wars.