Tom Hayden

Thomas Emmet "Tom" Hayden (December 11, 1939 – October 23, 2016) was an American social and political activist, author and politician, who was director of the Peace and Justice Resource Center in Los Angeles County, California. Known best for his major role as an anti-war, civil rights, and radical intellectual counterculture activist, Hayden was for a time the husband of actress Jane Fonda, and was the father of actor Troy Garity. 2Early life Thomas Emmet Hayden was born in Royal Oak, Michigan, to parents of Irish ancestry, Genevieve Isabelle (née Garity) and John Francis Hayden. His father was a former Marine who worked for Chrysler as an accountant and was also a violent drunk. When Hayden was ten, his parents divorced and his mother raised him. A smart kid, Hayden attended a Catholic elementary school, where he read out loud to nuns and "learned to fear hell," and later graduated from Dondero High School in Royal Oak, Michigan, class of 1956. While at Dondero High School, Hayden edited the school paper and after using the first letter of successive paragraphs to spell "Go to hell" in his farewell column, he was banned from attending his graduation ceremony and only received a diploma. Hayden grew up attending a church led by Charles Coughlin, a Catholic priest noted for his anti-Semite teachings and who was also known nationally during the time of The Great Depression as the "radio priest." Hayden's dismay with Coughlin caused him to break with the Catholic Church as a teenager. He later attended the University of Michigan, where he was editor of the Michigan Daily and, disenchanted by the anti-radicalism of existing groups like the National Student Association, was one of the initiators of the influential leftist student activist group Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). In 1961, Hayden married Sandra "Casey" Cason, a civil rights activist who worked for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC