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. As an assistant to civil rights leader Bayard Rustin, Kahn helped organize the 1963 March on Washington. Kahn's analysis of the civil rights movement influenced Rustin, who was the nominal author of "From Protest to Politics"; this article, originally a 1964 pamphlet from the League for Industrial Democracy, was written by Kahn, according to Rachelle Horowitz. It remains widely reprinted, for example in Rustin's Down the Line (1971) and Time on two crosses (2003).

A leader in the Socialist Party of America, Kahn supported its 1972 name change to Social Democrats, USA (SDUSA). Like other SDUSA leaders, Kahn worked to support free labor unions and democracy and against Soviet communism; he also worked to strengthen U.S. labor unions. Kahn worked as a senior assistant to 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.

In 1980, Kirkland appointed Kahn to organize the AFL–CIO's support for the Polish labor union Solidarity despite protests by the USSR and the Carter administration. Kahn began acting as director of the AFL–CIO's Department of International Affairs in 1986 and officially became director in 1989. He died in 1992, aged 53.