Gwendolyn (Gwen) Davis was born in Washington, Pennsylvania in 1939 and was raised by her grandmother in a suburb of Washington called Lincoln Hill until her grandmother’s death. Davis spent the rest of her childhood and adulthood with her parents in Newark, where she eventually became a nurse. In the 1980s and 1990s, Davis worked directly with HIV/AIDS patients doing intake interviews in emergency rooms and working on awareness campaigns in schools and hospitals.
Tom Hayden (1939-2016) was a major figure in the New Left of the 1960s. A young white man from Michigan, he was physically attacked by racist white Southerners when he accompanied the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee on “freedom rides” in the South. He was also an early leader of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the flagship organization of the student left and anti-war movement. As the author of the famous 1962 SDS Port Huron Statement, he spoke for white middle-class activists, with the opening line, “We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort,...
