Tom Hayden

Hayden served 18 years in the California legislature, chairing key committees on the environment, higher education and labor, has recently taught at at Scripps College and Pitzer College in Claremont, California, Occidental College, and Harvard University’s Institute of Politics. Hayden was a student editor at the University of Michigan, and a founding member of the Students for a Democratic Society in 1961. In 1961, Mr. Hayden joined the Freedom Riders on interstate buses in the South, challenging authorities who refused to enforce the Supreme Court’s rulings banning segregation on public buses. His jailhouse draft of what became the 25,000-word S.D.S. manifesto was debated, revised and formally adopted at the organization’s first convention, in Port Huron, Mich., in 1962. In 1968, Mr. Hayden helped plan antiwar protests in Chicago to coincide with the Democratic National Convention. Club-swinging police officers clashed with thousands of demonstrators, injuring hundreds in a televised spectacle that a national commission later called a police riot. But Mr. Hayden and others were charged by federal officials with inciting to riot and conspiracy. The Chicago Seven trial became a classic confrontation between radicals and Judge Julius Hoffman, marked by insults, angry judicial outbursts and contempt citations. In 1970, all seven defendants were acquitted of conspiracy, but Mr. Hayden and four others — Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, David Dellinger and Rennie Davis — were convicted of inciting to riot and sentenced to five years in prison. The verdicts were overturned on appeal, as were various contempt citations. Hayden lived in the Los Angeles area since 1971. He married to the Canadian actress-singer Barbara Williams in 1993 with whom he shares a son, Liam. Tom has two other children, Troy Garity and Vanessa Vadim, from an earlier marriage to the actress-activist Jane Fonda.