Solidarity Forever… More Lessons From “Burning Dreams”

I like posting photos from By the Light of Burning Dreams, the new book by Margaret Talbot and me about the revolutionary leaders of the 1960s and ‘70s. Here’s antiwar leader Tom Hayden with David Hilliard (left), a Black Panther leader, at a Mayday 1970 protest in New Haven, CT, where Bobby Seale and Ericka Huggins were being held in prison on trumped-up murder charges. (The photo was taken by Stephen Shames, who took some of the most memorable Black Panther pictures in the heat of action. ) The routine camaraderie between radical leaders and movements was a hallmark of the period. Today it goes by the clunky term “intersectionality” and is seen as a unique type of collaboration. But this solidarity between progressives should be commonplace.

Hayden negotiated with Yale University President Kingman Brewster Jr. to make sure that the protest, which drew 20,000 to the elite campus, did not turn violent. Anne Weills, Hayden’s lover at the time, marveled at the smooth way that Hayden — the product of a humble upbringing in suburban Detroit — could toggle between radicals and the power elite. But she came to resent his sense of male entitlement and she later organized his ouster — not only from their bedroom but from Berkeley’s radical nerve center, the Red Family commune.

We tell this story in By the Light of Burning Dreams — and how the deeply demoralized Hayden then reinvented himself in Los Angeles with Jane Fonda, reviving the antiwar movement and jumping into electoral politics. The debates about leadership that inflamed radical circles in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s are still very much alive today.

Here’s a photo of Hayden and Weills in happier times taken by Richard Avedon during his famous shoot of the Chicago Seven.