Born December 11, 1939
Royal Oak, Michigan

Politician, activist, and writer

The name Tom Hayden is nearly synonymous with the New Left—the protest movement of the 1960s in which middleclass college students, most of them from urban or suburban areas, opposed the Vietnam War (1954–75), racial discrimination, and the growing economic gulf between rich and poor. Hayden was a leader of one of the most influential groups of the era, the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS; see entry), and the author of its famous “The Port Huron Statement.”

Hayden participated in civil rights organizing in the American South and worked for economic justice in northern ghettos. He made two highly publicized trips to Vietnam during the Vietnam War to establish contact with the Viet Cong forces (with whom the United States was at war) and was a major organizer of the immense and...