The Port Huron Statement was written as the Black Freedom Movement rose up. Tom Hayden had the vision to help write that document in 1962, which became a spark, an igniter of the new left, the white left, the radical student and youth movements. “We are,” he wrote, “people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort … looking uneasily at the world we inherit.”
I’m still looking, more uneasily than ever, at the world we — our children and grandchildren — inherit.
Tom bridged multiple worlds in a long, fruitful life: SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) and a stint with SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) in the deep South; community organizing in Newark with ERAP (Economic Research and Action Project of SDS), agitating anti-war activism at the Chicago Democratic Convention, the Conspiracy 8 trial, later navigating as a Democratic Party progressive. He became a writer/teacher with Irish independence in his genes.
He wrote powerfully about Los Angeles and Chicago youth gangs, forced migration, Vietnam, climate change, and Cuba. And he continued steadily to oppose US imperialist wars. His anti-war website, the Peace and Justice Resource Center, maintained until just a few months before his death a trove of fierce opposition to American conquests, as well as remaining a source of reliable data. He estranged friends and comrades, myself included, when he traveled to support Israel, as an apparent quid pro quo for running for statewide office in the California Democratic Party.
Tom and I spent time together in Heidelberg, Germany, some 16 years ago, invited by young German historians who were researching and writing about the inter-relationships between US and German radicals during the ’60s and ’70s. We were asked to comment on their new scholarship based on recently available government surveillance files. We experienced it as a bittersweet moment, becoming ourselves ancient history yet determined to remain radically, lovingly relevant.
Twice during that conference, I accompanied Tom in the evenings to meetings he had scheduled with American Democrats living abroad, and with US citizens working at Ramstein US Air Force base, talking about the perils of US military power. He encouraged them to analyze the historic moment, to press forward nuclear disarmament, to work for peace. He was seen as a terrifically smart man with a foot in the movement and a foot in the Democratic Party, and they could listen.
I invited Tom to speak at conference about youth gangs I organized in Chicago a few years later. Tom and I walked out along Lake Michigan and had what we used to call, an “off the record” conversation (i.e., totally confidential, not to be repeated). I asked him whether he had, or knew who had, broken into that FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania, in 1971. Those FBI files were published, exposing their secret counterintelligence (“COINTELPRO”) program of assassination and criminalization aimed at the Black Freedom movement, and disruption and harassment against the anti-war movement. Tom said, “No, I thought you did it!” I said no, I didn’t, but I wished I had.
Tom’s big strategic brain and his excellent writing are also his legacy: his persistence, his love of Barbara, Liam, and Troy, his impatience, and his quiet humor. Happily, his recognition of the critical importance of participatory democracy and connecting the issues have now been seized upon and reframed by a new generation of radical activists.
Tom Hayden, presente!
Truthout Is Preparing to Meet Trump’s Agenda With Resistance at Every Turn
Dear Truthout Community,
If you feel rage, despondency, confusion and deep fear today, you are not alone. We’re feeling it too. We are heartsick. Facing down Trump’s fascist agenda, we are desperately worried about the most vulnerable people among us, including our loved ones and everyone in the Truthout community, and our minds are racing a million miles a minute to try to map out all that needs to be done.
We must give ourselves space to grieve and feel our fear, feel our rage, and keep in the forefront of our mind the stark truth that millions of real human lives are on the line. And simultaneously, we’ve got to get to work, take stock of our resources, and prepare to throw ourselves full force into the movement.
Journalism is a linchpin of that movement. Even as we are reeling, we’re summoning up all the energy we can to face down what’s coming, because we know that one of the sharpest weapons against fascism is publishing the truth.
There are many terrifying planks to the Trump agenda, and we plan to devote ourselves to reporting thoroughly on each one and, crucially, covering the movements resisting them. We also recognize that Trump is a dire threat to journalism itself, and that we must take this seriously from the outset.
After the election, the four of us sat down to have some hard but necessary conversations about Truthout under a Trump presidency. How would we defend our publication from an avalanche of far right lawsuits that seek to bankrupt us? How would we keep our reporters safe if they need to cover outbreaks of political violence, or if they are targeted by authorities? How will we urgently produce the practical analysis, tools and movement coverage that you need right now — breaking through our normal routines to meet a terrifying moment in ways that best serve you?
It will be a tough, scary four years to produce social justice-driven journalism. We need to deliver news, strategy, liberatory ideas, tools and movement-sparking solutions with a force that we never have had to before. And at the same time, we desperately need to protect our ability to do so.
We know this is such a painful moment and donations may understandably be the last thing on your mind. But we must ask for your support, which is needed in a new and urgent way.
We promise we will kick into an even higher gear to give you truthful news that cuts against the disinformation and vitriol and hate and violence. We promise to publish analyses that will serve the needs of the movements we all rely on to survive the next four years, and even build for the future. We promise to be responsive, to recognize you as members of our community with a vital stake and voice in this work.
Please dig deep if you can, but a donation of any amount will be a truly meaningful and tangible action in this cataclysmic historical moment.
We’re with you. Let’s do all we can to move forward together.
With love, rage, and solidarity,
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