It's surprising that as late as 1964 Tom Hayden was still willing to believe a story as hopeful as this one, and I think some of that optimism was because of hi

It's surprising that as late as 1964 Tom Hayden was still willing to believe a story as hopeful as this one, and I think some of that optimism was because of his race (he was white), because as early as 1962 he'd already heard Ralph Abernathy (the right-hand man of Martin Luther King) give his speech about "The civil rights movement is in a race with the farm tractors." Abernathy's view was grim: legal discrimination had left more than a third of African American's working in agriculture, but the automation of agriculture was wiping out those jobs. Abernathy thought it was crucial that the civil rights movement open up the rest of the economy for African Americans, before they lost all their old jobs on the farm. Tom Hayden mentions this in his memoir, though he admits "At the time, I had no idea what Abernathy was talking about." But the African Americans seemed to have had the clearest and most accurate picture of what was about to happen: millions of jobs would disappear, and vast ghettos would appear in the cities, full of African Americans who had no work, either because of the loss of textile jobs in the city or because of people losing their jobs on the farm and then moving to the cities.