Tom Khan

Tom Khan

Tom David Kahn (September 15, 1938 – March 27, 1992) was an American social democrat known for his leadership in several organizations. He was an activist and influential strategist in the Civil Rights Movement. He was a senior adviser and leader in the U.S. labor movement.Kahn was raised in New York City. At Brooklyn College, he joined the U.S. socialist movement, where he was influenced by Max Shachtman and Michael Harrington. As an assistant to civil rights leader Bayard Rustin, Kahn helped to organize the 1963 March on Washington, during which Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech. Kahn's analysis of the civil rights movement influenced Bayard Rustin (who was the nominal author of Kahn's "From Protest to Politics"). (This article, originally a 1964 pamphlet from the League for Industrial Democracy, was written by Kahn, according to Horowitz (2007, pp. 223–224). It remains widely reprinted, for example in Rustin's Down the Line of 1971 and Time on two crosses of 2003.) A leader in the Socialist Party of America, Kahn supported its 1972 name change to Social Democrats, USA (SDUSA). Like other leaders of SDUSA, Kahn worked to support free labor-unions and democracy and to oppose Soviet communism; he also worked to strengthen U.S. labor unions. Kahn worked as a senior assistant to and speechwriter for Democratic Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson, AFL–CIO Presidents George Meany and Lane Kirkland, and other leaders of the Democratic Party, labor unions, and civil-rights organizations.In 1980 Lane Kirkland appointed Kahn to organize the AFL–CIO's support for the Polish labor-union Solidarity; this support was made despite protests by the USSR and the Carter administration. He acted as the Director of the AFL–CIO's Department of International Affairs in 1986 and was officially named Director in 1989. Kahn died in 1992, at the age of 53.

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