Tom Kahn

Tom Kahn
Tom Kahn, Director of the Department of International Affairs for the AFL–CIO 1986–1992
Born	Thomas John Marcel (1938-09-15)September 15, 1938 New York City
Died	March 27, 1992(1992-03-27) (aged 53) Silver Spring, Maryland
Other names	T. Kahn, Thomas David Kahn Tom Marcel
Organization	Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) League for Industrial Democracy, (LID) (Director) Social Democrats, USA (SDUSA) AFL–CIO's Department of International Affairs (Director)
Movement	Civil Rights Movement, American social democracy, American labor, Democracy

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 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.