Famed '60s anti-war activist Tom Hayden, whose name became forever linked with the celebrated Chicago 8 trial, Vietnam War protests and his ex-wife actress Jane Fonda, has died.
He was 76. He died yesterday after a long illness, said his wife, Barbara Williams.
Hayden, once denounced as a traitor by his detractors, overcame his past and won election to the California Assembly and Senate where he served for almost two decades as a progressive force on such issues as the environment and education.
He was the only one of the radical Chicago 8 defendants to win such distinction in the mainstream political world.
He remained an enduring voice against war and spent his later years as a prolific writer and lecturer advocating for reform of America's political institutions.
Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti praised Hayden. "A political giant and dear friend has passed. Tom Hayden fought harder for what he believed than just about anyone I have known. RIP, Tom," Garcetti says on his Twitter account.
Hayden wrote or edited 19 books, including "Reunion," a memoir of his path to protest and a rumination on the political upheavals of the '60s.
"Rarely, if ever, in American history has a generation begun with higher ideals and experienced greater trauma than those who lived fully the short time from 1960 to 1968," he wrote.
Hayden was there at the start. In 1960, while a student at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, he was involved in the formation of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), then dedicated to desegregating the South.
By 1962, when he began drafting the landmark Port Huron Statement, SDS and Hayden were dedicated to changing the world.
"We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably at the world we inherit," began the statement which outlined a plan for a revolutionary campus social movement.
Hayden was fond of comparing the student movement that followed to the American Revolution and the Civil War.
In 1968, he helped organize anti-war demonstrations during the Democratic National Convention in Chicago that turned violent and resulted in the notorious Chicago 7 trial.
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