Hayden committed himself to the effort. For three years in Newark, he worked with a community union to organize poor black residents to take on slumlords, city inspectors and others. He was there to witness the 1967 Newark Riots which, in Rebellion in Newark (1967), he tried to place in a larger social and economic context. His profile in Newark attracted the attention of the FBI. “In view of the fact that Hayden is an effective speaker who appeals to intellectual groups and has also worked with and supported the Negro people in their program in Newark," agents recommended that he "be placed on the Rabble Rouser Index.” Hayden was later to suggest that if ERAP across the country had failed to build to greater success (the promised "interracial movement of the poor") it was because of the escalating U.S. commitment in Vietnam: "Once again the government met an internal crisis by starting an external crisis." Anti-war activist In 1965, while still committed in Newark, Hayden, along with Communist Party USA member Herbert Aptheker and Quaker peace activist Staughton Lynd, undertook a controversial visit to North Vietnam. The three toured villages and factories and met with an American POW whose plane had been shot down. The result of this tour of North Vietnam, at a high point in the war, was a book titled The Other Side. Staughton Lynd later wrote that the New Left disavowed "the Anti-Communism of the previous generation", and that Lynd and Hayden had written, in Studies on the Left: "We refuse to be anti-Communist. We insist the term has lost all the specific content it once had." In 1968, Hayden joined the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam ("the Mobe"), and played a major role in the protests outside the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Illinois. The demonstrations were broken up by what the U.S. National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence later described as a police riot. Six months after the convention, he and seven other protesters including Rennie Davis, Dave Dellinger, Abbie Hoffman, and Jerry Rubin were indicted on federal charges of conspiracy and incitement to riot as part of the "Chicago Eight", a.k.a. the "Chicago Seven" after Bobby Seale's case was separated from the others. Hayden and four others were convicted of crossing state lines to incite a riot, but the charges were later reversed and remanded