Tom Kahn

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 and 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. and officially became director in 1989. on September 15, 1938, and was immediately placed for adoption at the New York Foundling Hospital. He was adopted by Adele and David Kahn and renamed Thomas David Kahn. His father, a member of the Communist Party USA, became president of the Transport Workers Local 101 of the Brooklyn Union Gas Company. He had a short relationship with a member of the Young People's Socialist League (YPSL):

Although everyone active in the movement was aware of it, [before 1956] he was never explicitly out of the closet. He took his sexual orientation as an affliction, a source of pain and embarrassment. In part, perhaps, because he was so unreconciled to his longings, he limited himself for a long time to brief encounters. But then he became involved with one of the YPSL's and was compelled to seek the counsel of a psychiatrist to explain his unfamiliar feelings. The diagnosis, he told me, was "you're in love." Kahn accepted his homosexuality in 1956, the year he and Horowitz volunteered to help Rustin with his work in the civil rights movement. "Once he met Bayard, then Kahn knew that he was gay and had this long-term relationship with Bayard, which went through many stages", where he became a leader in student politics. He worked closely with Stokely Carmichael, who later became a national leader of young civil-rights activists and then one a leader of the Black Power movement. Kahn and Carmichael helped fund a five-day run of The Threepenny Opera, by the Marxist playwright Bertolt Brecht and the socialist composer Kurt Weill: "Kahn—very shrewdly—had captured the position of Treasurer of the Liberal Arts Student Council and the infinitely charismatic and popular Carmichael as floor whip was good at lining up the votes. Before they knew what hit them the Student Council had become a patron of the arts, having voted to buy out the remaining performances."

Leadership Kahn (along with Horowitz and Norman Hill) helped Rustin and A. Philip Randolph plan the 1963 March on Washington. Carmichael, and William Julius Wilson. Afterward, Marxism–Leninism, particularly the Progressive Labor Party, helped write SDS's "death sentence". Ben Wattenberg said that SDUSA members seemed to be

Kahn worked as a senior assistant and speechwriter for 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. The trade union Solidarity (Solidarność) began in 1980. The Soviet-backed Communist regime headed by General Wojciech Jaruzelski declared martial law in December 1981.

In 1980, AFL–CIO President Lane Kirkland appointed Kahn to organize the AFL–CIO's support of Solidarity. The AFL–CIO sought approval in advance from Solidarity's leadership to avoid jeopardizing its position with unwanted or surprising U.S. help . Politically, the AFL–CIO supported the Gdansk workers' 21 demands by lobbying to stop further U.S. loans to Poland unless the demands were met. Materially, the AFL–CIO established the Polish Workers Aid Fund. By 1981 it had raised almost $300,000, Aid to Solidarity was also initially opposed by neo-conservatives Norman Podhoretz and Jeane Kirkpatrick, who before 1982 argued that communism could not be overthrown and that Solidarity was doomed.

Director of the AFL–CIO's Department of International Affairs In 1986, Kahn became director of the AFL–CIO Department of International Affairs, where he implemented Kirkland's program of a consensus foreign policy. Working with leaders from member unions, Kahn helped draft resolutions that represented consensus decisions on nearly all issues.

Living with AIDS Earlier in 1986, Kahn learned that he was infected with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), then a terminal diagnosis. He wanted to spend his remaining years with his new partner,

Kahn died of acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) in Silver Spring, Maryland, on March 27, 1992, aged 53, after having been cared for by his partner and supported by his friends and colleagues.