Joseph Hayden, who fought for voting rights for ex-felons, dies at age 82

Joseph Hayden, a lieutenant of a notorious Harlem drug gang who cycled in and out of prison for decades, then turned his life around and became an activist for criminal justice reform and a well-known figure in Harlem, wielding a camera to track possible police incidents to document. harassment, died January 6 in Northampton, Pennsylvania. He was 82.

The cause was a heart attack, said his daughter Jo-Anne Hayden-Williams. Mr. Hayden was at her home at the time.

While behind bars in the 1990s, Mr. Hayden ignored the formal education he had earlier in his life as a street hustler, earning bachelor's and master's degrees.

“As I educated and developed myself, I began to see opportunities in other areas,” he told The New York Times in 2009. “I started working on changing the system, trying to reform the system.”

Mr. Hayden filed a class action lawsuit in 2000 to restore the voting rights of prisoners and parolees. Hayden v. Pataki, which was argued in federal court by the Legal Defense Fund, a civil rights group, ultimately failed. But it was an early salvo in a national campaign to restore the voting rights of ex-felons, which Governor Andrew Cuomo did under government orders in New York in 2018.

Janai Nelson, president of the Legal Defense Fund, called Mr. Hayden “a legend in Harlem and in the broader community of formerly incarcerated activists,” someone who “helped spark a powerful movement” to win voting rights for released felons.

Jamal Josepha former member of the Black Panther Party who is now a film professor at Columbia University, and who knew Mr. Hayden for much of his life, said in an interview that he had been “a young gangster on the street” coming out of prison dedicated to political and social activism.

“He completely left the streets behind and embraced what he could do in Harlem,” Mr. Joseph said. “It changed the narrative about formerly incarcerated people. Previously, there was no sense that society owed them a debt, that many people were wrongfully or excessively imprisoned.”

In 2010, Mr. Hayden was galvanized by Michelle Alexander's “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness,” a bestseller whose thesis that tough-on-crime laws led to an explosion of black men in prison were an attempt to roll back the gains of the civil rights era.

He founded an advocacy group to end mass incarceration and invited Ms. Alexander to speak at Riverside Church in Manhattan. She expected a modest crowd but was surprised to find a thousand people, including activist Angela Davis and Princeton professor Cornel West, drawn by Mr. Hayden's action.

“I was blown away by this 70-year-old man who had more energy, passion and dedication than many organizers a fraction of his age,” Ms. Alexander later wrote in nominating Mr. Hayden for a grant for grass-roots organizers.

Riverside Church was also the setting in 2011 for a commemoration that Mr. Hayden helped organize to mark the 40th anniversary of the Attica prison uprising, considered a milestone in the prisoners' rights movement. Mr. Hayden had been a prisoner in Attica but was transferred just days before the 1971 violence that left 43 men dead. About 2,000 people packed the church for the commemoration.

Late in life, Mr. Hayden downplayed his criminal past. A New York police spokesman told The Times in 2012 that Mr. Hayden had nearly two dozen arrests, dating back to 1957. He was in Attica for the attempted murder of a police officer, a conviction that Mr. Hayden said had been overturned.

“For me, crime is a reaction,” he said. “You play the hand you're dealt in life. And the hand I was dealt was very hard.”

Joseph Hayden was born at Harlem Hospital on May 12, 1941, the son of Sylvia Hayden, who later worked as a hospital dietitian, and Alfred Freeman, a merchant seaman. The couple separated soon after his birth and Joseph was raised by his mother, although stories from his early life suggest he fended for himself on the streets.

In addition to Mrs. Hayden-Williams, his survivors include six other children, Geneva, Jazzanee and Nicole Hayden; Jazzmin Brown, Stephen Ramon and Joseph Adams; a sister, Gloria Hayden; 12 grandchildren and three great-grandchildren. He was married for more than 30 years to Jacqueline (Adams) Hayden, a project manager for a construction company, who died in 2013.

In his youth, Mr. Hayden, known since childhood by the nickname Jazz, searched the streets for income, gambling and selling small amounts of marijuana and heroin. He narrated author TJ English for “The Savage City,” a chronicle of violence in New York in the 1960s and 1970s.

Mr Hayden was first arrested at the age of 16 on charges of heroin possession and sentenced to three years in prison. He came out “bitter, angry and dangerous,” he told Mr. English. “It literally turned me into an animal.”

In the 1970s, he was a top lieutenant to Nicky Barnes, a flamboyant Harlem drug dealer known as “Mr. Untouchable,” written by Cuba Gooding Jr. was played in the 2007 film “American Gangster.”

Mr. Barnes, a folk hero in some corners of his community, formed a circle of seven associates called the Council, including Mr. Hayden. At a 1977 trial, prosecutors named Mr. Hayden the No. 2 man and presented a tax return in which he reported $136,460 in “miscellaneous income.”

He, Mr. Barnes and others were convicted of conspiring to distribute $1 million worth of heroin each month. Mr Hayden got 15 years.

When he was released from federal prison in the 1980s, he was not free for long. He was found guilty of manslaughter in the death of a sanitation worker during a road rage incident and served twelve years.

When he was released from prison for the last time in 2000, he began his years of activism. In 2008, he raised $40,000 and began filming news events from the Harlem community and uploading them to his own site. Everything in Haarlem.

His most popular videos were the series “Copwatch,” in which he recorded police officers patting down black and Latino people and sometimes making arrests. It was the culmination of New York's stop-and-frisk policing policy, which was criticized by opponents as racial profiling and harassment.

Mr Hayden didn't hesitate to add his own commentary to the videos. “This is the kind of policing we see in Harlem.” he said mockinglybetween expletives, as police arrested a man found with a marijuana cigarette.

In 2011, Mr Hayden himself was arrested for driving with a broken taillight. Police spotted a souvenir baseball bat from a Yankees game in the backseat and a switchblade knife in the front console and charged him with weapons possession. He called it a “fake stop and frisk” in retaliation for documenting police activity.

Nearly a year later, the Manhattan district attorney's office rejected claims that the traffic stop was retaliation, but prosecutors dropped one charge and offered to dismiss a second if Mr. Hayden would perform five days of community service. He called it “a complete and total victory.”