I Almost Got To Be Friends With Tom Hayden, Says Civil Rights Ebook Author

June 30, 2011 - PRLog -- I almost got to be "friends" with Tom Hayden. Someone recommended him to me as a facebook friend. But when I clicked to accept, I got the sad message that he is already full  up --  that he can't take on any new friends.

Apparently he has reached his 5,000 friends limit. And I am sad.

As a civil rights book and ebook author (Who Killed Emmett Till, The Emmett Till Book, Where Rebels Roost; Mississippi Civil Rights Revisited, Cashing In On Diversity), I would have been proud to be friends with this civil rights giant.

The American writer and political activist Thomas Emmet Hayden (born 1939) was one of the few radical leaders of the 1960s to outlast the movement. He was admired for remaining alive politically without sacrifice of his principles. In 1961, Progressive magazine sent him to McComb, MS, where he was to cover the student walkout at all-black Burglund High School. During to the walkout, he was pulled from an automobile, and was 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 region North of McComb where Emmett Till was killed in 1955. 1961 was early for someone like him to come into Mississippi -- he was terribly brave to make the trip. Joan Baez was once there, too. I learned how she almost tied herself to a swingset at an elementary school as children were being beaten in the school yard. She really gave herself to the civil rights movements and at one point, people also feared for her life.

Just about anyone with a political name made it into Mississippi during those years. 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 was there, Harry Belafonte, and so many other names we can never forget.

A friend of mine, civil rights activist Margaret Block (her brother was a young SNCC leader, Sam Block) tells me how she loved watching Bob Dylan accompanied children singing in the small town of Ruleville, home of Fannie Lou Hamer. This was also during that 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. She told Democrats in a famous speech how she was raped and beaten for using a white restroom in Mississippi. She would later die from the injuries she received and from her poor health, from years of being ill and malnourished.

Well, it would have been nice to be Tom Hayden's friend. Even if only on facebook.

He is an American icon to be admired and we need more leadership and voices like his today, when it comes to Afghanistan and so many other civil liberties issues. I would have loved to ask him questions and share the answers with my friends.

So come on -- if someone out there in facebook land is his friend, someone who has lots of other friends and is willing to lose him, please let me know. I would REALLY love to get to know him better. He is certainly someone I admire.

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Susan Klopfer, MBA, likes to speak, consult and write books about civil rights history and diversity management.