I almost got to be friends with Tom Hayden

1960s civil rights and anti-war activist, Tom Hayden (photo may be subject to copyright)

Without heroes, we are all just plain people who don't know how far we could go. Bernard Malamud

I almost got to be friends with Tom Hayden.

Someone recommended us as facebook friends but when I clicked to accept, I learned he is already "full" -- Tom can't take on any new friends; he most likely hit his 5,000 friend limit years ago.

Well, darn it.

As a civil rights book and ebook author, I would have been proud to be friends with this civil rights giant.

American writer and political activist Thomas Emmet Hayden (born 1939) was one of the few radical leaders of the 1960s to outlast the movement, and is admired for remaining alive politically without sacrifice of his principles.

In 1961, Progressive magazine sent him to McComb, a small town in southern Mississippi (home of Medgar Evers) where he was tasked to cover the student walkout at all-black Burglund High School.

During to the walkout, he was pulled from an automobile, and beaten badly. He was warned to get out of town so that he would not be killed.

I am pretty sure he made it to the Mississippi Delta, too, the once-dangerous region north of McComb where Emmett Till was killed in 1955.

The year 1961 was early for someone like Hayden to come into Mississippi -- he was terribly brave just to make the trip.

Hayden's friend, Joan Baez, traveled to the Delta and tried to tie herself to a swingset at an elementary school, protesting because black children were being beaten in the school yard. Locals feared for her life.

Nearly anyone with a political name made it into Mississippi during those years of the modern civil rights movement. Mario Savio, later to be the 21-year-old leader of the Berkeley Free Speech movement, a student uprising at the University of California, Berkely, also was in McComb where he worked during freedom summer.

Marion Barry went to Mississippi, Harry Belafonte, and so many other famous people who cared.

A friend of mine, civil rights activist Margaret Block (she and her brother, Sam Block, were early SNCC members) tells me how she loved watching Bob Dylan accompanied children singing in the small town of Ruleville, home of activist Fannie Lou Hamer, during the magical freedom summer.

Hamer was a home grown activist who later stood up to Hubert Humphrey and Lyndon B. Johnson at the National Democratic Convention when she told Democrats in a famous speech how she was raped and beaten for using a white restroom at a bus stop in a small Mississippi cotton town. Hamer would later die from the injuries she received back then, and from her poor health, owing to many years of being ill and malnourished.

Well, it would have been nice to be Tom Hayden's friend.

To me, he is an American icon to be admired and we need more leadership like his in today's world, especially when it comes to civil liberties and rights issues.

I would have loved to ask Tom Hayden questions about his time in Mississippi and share the answers with my friends. I want to know more about Vietnam (and Jane Fonda).

I want to try and get Hayden to produce a movie on Emmett Till -- a movie that is totally unlike The Help -- a movie that actually tells the truth about the modern civil rights movement and isn't just a feel-good movie that puts white people on pedestals or whitewashes real history.

So come on -- if someone out there in facebook land is Hayden's friend, someone who has lots of other friends besides Hayden and is willing to lose him at least for a while, please let me know.

Or let Tom know.

Either way is okay.

(Note: Very soon after I wrote this blog post -- Tom Hayden emailed me and made it possible to be his friend. He actually dumped somebody for me!! What a treat. Thank You, Mr. Hayden. You continue to be a hero to me. sk)