Skeletons from the radical past may soon stalk Californians if the state chooses to open the files of its own committee on “un-American activities.”

The files mention at least one current state senator, Los Angeles Democrat Tom Hayden, once a leader of the new left and former husband of actress Jane Fonda.

State Sen. Bill Lockyer, a Hayward Democrat currently running for state attorney general wants to release the files, sealed since 1971.

“There is no reason to hide these matters,” Mr. Lockyer told reporters. “I just think it is better that our records be open to expose whatever good—and whatever bad—was collected.”

The 80 boxes of material include records on thousands of individuals, photographs and Dictaphone records from committee sessions that were secretly recorded.

“We wondered what is on there” said Virgil Meibert of the Senate Rules Committee, who estimates it would take six months to archive the files.

“Most people have forgotten that this existed,” Mr. Meibert said. “It is incredibly valuable historical material. There are a couple of movies in here.”

Some in the Senate want to purge material that could be embarrassing to those mentioned in the files. These include Bert Corona, once a director of a Communist Party “workers school” in Los Angeles and now head of Hermandad Mexicana National, the group accused of voter fraud in the Bob Dorman-Loretta Sanchez election.

Stephen Schwartz, a San Francisco-based historian of radical movements and author of “From West to East,” believes the files will provide a solid documentary backup for study of the Communist Party, which dominated California politics during the 1930s and 1940s. Mr. Schwartz anticipates resistance from academics.

“The liberal Mafia that run the universities will go to any lengths to see that such a study doesn’t take place,” Mr. Schwartz said. “The pathetic thing is that people still need documentary proof that Stalinist Communism was evil.”

The state’s Joint Fact-Finding Committee on Un-American Activities began with Jack Tenney, a left-wing Los Angeles musician, union official and composer of the song “Mexicali Rose.” Mr. Tenney joined with Sam Yorty, who would go on to become mayor of Los Angeles, in welcoming the People’s Daily World, the West Coast organ of the Communist Party.

When the House Committee on Un-American Activities started investigating Hollywood in 1938, Mr. Tenney joked that committee Chairman Martin Dies, Texas Democrat, would soon unearth the Communist Party cards of Shirley Temple and Donald Duck. But Mr. Tenney would soon be conducting investigations of his own.

In 1939, Hitler and Stalin signed a pact, and the Communist Party reversed its anti-Nazi stand and opposed American aid to the Allies, dubbing President Franklin Roosevelt’s “warmonger.” the reversal prompted Mr. Tenney and many others to distance themselves from the party . As a state senator, the composer became one of California’s most ardent anti-subversives.

Created in 1940, the committee’s first report published information on the Communist Party, the German American Bund, pro-Italian and pro-Japanese fascists, the Ku Klux Klan and pro-Nazi groups in Mexico. Some of the material that remains under seal involves collaboration between the Communist Party USA and the German American Bund during the Nazi-Soviet Pact. Many former Communist Party members testified to the committee, but only portions of their testimony have been made public.

An investigator named Charles Baksey infiltrated a group channeling Soviet funds to Communist labor organizers. Mr. Baksoy’s full testimony has yet to be revealed.

The “Tenney Committee” as it became known held hearings on communism in Hollywood, with its proceedings sometimes turning into a shouting match. The communist Party press regularly railed against the committee, which published some valuable material about Soviet espionage in the American nuclear weapons program.

After 1950, the committee carried on without Mr. Tenney, who became too zealous a Red-hunter even for some of his former colleagues.

During the 1960s the committee focused on the new left, recording the names and addresses of hundreds of students involved in demonstrations at the University of California at Berkeley. The committee also charted the rise of such groups as the Black Panthers and United Slaves, groups that in 1969 fought a gun battle in the UCLA cafeteria.

In its final report, the committee published excerpts from a Black Panther coloring book that portrayed black children shooting policemen, drawn with the faces of pigs. A policeman being stabbed in the back is captioned, “The only good pig is a dead pig.”

Unsealing of the files would provide additional information on such groups as the right-wing Minutemen, the Chinese Red Guards and the American Nazi Party, publisher of Storm Trooper Magazine.

Some mentioned in the files may be saved from troubling revelations. Under one proposal, California would follow the congressional pattern by revealing everything 50 years old but nothing less than that age.

Kenneth Lloyd Billingsley is editorial director of the Pacific Research Institute in San Francisco and the author of From Mainline to Sideline: The Social Witness of the National Council of Churches. He can be reached via email at klbillingsley@pacificresearch.org.