Legendary activist Tom Hayden on SDS, Chicago 7, climate change and making a difference

This Vermont Conversation originally broadcast in April 2015.Tom Hayden was a leader of the student, civil rights, peace and environmental movements of the 1960s. He went on to serve 18 years in the California legislature. He was a founder of Students for a Democratic Society and was described by the NY Times as “the single greatest figure of the 1960s student movement.” Hayden died in October 2016 at the age of 76.During the Vietnam War, Hayden made controversial trips to Hanoi with his former wife, actress Jane Fonda, to promote peace talks and facilitate the release of American POWs. He helped lead street demonstrations against the war at the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention, where he was beaten, gassed and arrested twice. Hayden was indicted in 1969 with seven others on conspiracy and incitement charges in what eventually became the Chicago Seven trial, considered one of the leading political trials of the last century (the trial began as the Chicago Eight but became the Chicago Seven when the case against codefendent Bobby Seale, co-founder of the Black Panther Party, was severed from the others). The trial was the subject of the 2020 Hollywood movie, “The Trial of the Chicago Seven,” in which Hayden was played by actor Eddie Redmayne.Hayden was Director of the Peace and Justice Resource Center in Culver City, California, and advised former California Gov. Jerry Brown on renewable energy. He was the author and editor of 20 books.I spoke with Hayden in March 2015 at the University of Michigan Ann Arbor, where Hayden spoke at the 50th anniversary of the first Vietnam War teach in held on a US college campus.I asked Hayden what he was proudest of in his long career of activism. "Living this long and being able to have children and grandchildren, and to observe the spread of participatory democracy and to see — despite all the failures of the left and the lack of organization, the infighting, the sectarianism, the feuds — that wave after wave of young people keep coming," he replied."I'm proudest of the fact that there's some instinct in being human that aspires to greater things than your parents had, a better world than the one that you were born into."