Casey Hayden

In 1994 she married her partner Paul Buckwalter (1934-2016), with whom, in Tucson Arizona, she had care of seven stepchildren. A veteran of the 1968 Poor People's March on Washington and of community organizing with the Industrial Areas Foundation, Buckwalter was an Episcopalian priest and a leader in the Sanctuary movement. In 2010 Hayden spoke out against Arizona SB 1070, a state measure that criminalizes the movement by outlawing the shelter and transport undocumented immigrants. It was "the most obvious example," she commented, of "Fortress America, the right wing's answer to the real issues we all face: 'We’ve got it and we are keeping it and we’ll shoot you if you try to get any of it.'"

In 1986, Casey Hayden was interviewed with regard to Freedom Summer by researchers for the PBS television series Eyes on the Prize. She was not asked about the issues raised by Sex and Caste but was pressed on black-white division within the SNCC Mississippi operation, particularly in the light of calls for Black Power and black separatism. She allowed that there was an understandable degree of frustration, even resentment, felt by the local black staff, "the backbone" of the project, in having to deal "with a lot of young white people who were intellectual and moneyed." Calls for Black Power only came later, after Freedom Summer, and were in great measure a reaction, she believed, to continued political exclusion, something which the refusal to accredit the MFDP at the Democratic convention had dramatically symbolized: "it was like, if you won't let us in, we'll do our own thing."

This still suggested too loose, too confederal a structure for the party-political direction on which Forman and others were now travelling. At first this was toward the project of a Southwide Freedom Summer that, independent of the manpower and publicity of white volunteers, would build a "Black Belt political party" that could write its "own voting bill." Later, and after a decision in 1966 to organize embattled ghettos in the North, it was toward a coast-to-coast "Black United Front." This was to be forged through a merger (from which Forman and the majority did, ultimately, pull back) with the Black Panthers: Stokely Carmichael as "Prime Minister", James Forman as "Foreign Minister." Hayden had couched her proposals in gender-neutral terms, but she did believe that it was in a grassroots organization that women's voices would be most influential. Whether or not it was uppermost in her mind at the time, she later reflected that "patriarchy was an issue."

Hayden's vision was of a "radically democratic" movement driven by organizers in the field. In defending grassroots organization she believed she was also advocating for the voice of women. In "Sex and Caste" (November 1965), a reworking of an internal memo they had drafted with other SNCC women, Hayden and Mary King drew "parallels" with the experience of African-Americans to suggest that women are "caught up in a common-law caste system that operates, sometimes subtly, forcing them to work around or outside hierarchical structures of power." Since regarded as a bridge connecting civil rights to women's liberation, Hayden describes its publication as her "last action as a movement activist."

In November 1965, Hayden had the paper published in Liberation, the bi-monthly of the War Resisters League, the title Sex and Caste being suggested by the editor by David McReynolds. It was, Hayden has pointed out, her "last action as movement activist."

In the fall of 1965 Hayden had been in a difficult position. Like some other white SNCC veterans after Freedom Summer she "took a stab at white organizing." Officially on loan from the SNCC, Hayden worked with the SDS in Chicago organizing displaced Appalachian women into a welfare recipients union, a foot soldier in Tom Hayden's vision of an "interracial movement of the poor." It was hard and, because of male violence, at times dangerous. She realized it was "foolhardy" to organize women alone and on her own. She needed help, and this was motive for revisiting the original memo. She was also at a point at which it was clear that there was no going back to the SNCC she had known.

At an April 1965 SNCC Executive Committee meeting in Holly Springs, Mississippi, Hayden was labelled a "floater," a "derisive term for staff members who were viewed as too independent from the leadership structure." Although at times raucous, the reception of the paper on women may not have been the immediate issue. Hayden had authored, and owned to, another paper at Waveland the previous November, a "Memorandum on Structure."—her own contribution on the question of constitutional revision.

At her last SNCC meeting in November 1965, Hayden, "at dinner," told both Forman and Chairman John Lewis that the "imbalance of power in SNCC" was such that they would both need to step down if the movement was to remain "radically democratic." In the meeting itself, her notes record that Hayden did not speak in defense of her position that a "looser structure" was not "'no structure,' but [a] different structure" because, she concluded, "no one would have listened."

After 1965 Hayden worked for the New York Department of Welfare for a couple of years before moving to a rural Vermont commune with some other Mississippi veterans. She studied Zen Buddhism, and had two children with Dondald Campbell Boyce III, a "yogi carpenter" who helped Hayden and others establish the Integral Yoga Institute of San Francisco in 1970. In 1981, Hayden was back in Atlanta working for the voter-education, voter-registration Southern Regional Council. Later, she worked in the mayoral administration of Martin Luther King Jr.'s former lieutenant, Andrew Young, as an administrative aide in the Department of Parks, Recreation and Culture.

In 1964 she became organizer and strategist for Freedom Summer and for the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party in the challenge they were to mount to the seating of the all-white regulars at the 1964 Democratic National Convention. She explains that in those roles:

SNCC executive secretary James Forman had questioned Martin Luther King Jr.'s top-down leadership style at the Southern Christian Leadership Conference Yet by the close of 1964 he was increasingly insistent on the need within the SNCC for "structure." Hayden conceded that at this point "there was no way to make a decision." In the absence of a command structure "there was no regular communication between Atlanta and the organizers. We had been flying by the seat of our pants for years." Through the committee Forman put forward a plan for a decision making structure that "spoke to the structural needs of the Atlanta office." Bob Moses countered with a paper that "spoke to the structural needs of organizers."

In 1963, Casey Hayden moved to Mississippi where, along with Doris Derby, she was asked to begin a literacy project at Tougaloo College in an all-black community outside Jackson. The comparative safety of the college was a consideration: out in the field the increased visibility she brought as a white woman was a risk not only to herself, but also to her comrades. But it was also important to Hayden that the "request was specifically made" because of her background in English education:

It was from the jail cell that Tom Hayden began drafting what was to become the Port Huron Statement, adopted by the SDS at its convention in June 1962 in Ann Arbor, Michigan. With Tom Hayden elected SDS president for the 1962–1963 academic year, and Casey Hayden heeding the SNCC call to return to Atlanta, they separated, divorcing in 1965. While she had had the reputation in the SDS of being "one of the boys," much of the discussion within the SDS inner circle struck her as young men posturing. Her heart was with the SNCC where, consistent with the focus on action, greater value was placed on building relationships, and where women, Black women, spoke out.

In the summer of 1961 Cason moved to New York City and lived with Tom Hayden. In a ceremony invoking Albert Camus--"I, on the other hand, choose justice in order to remain faithful to the world"—they married in October, and then moved to Atlanta. "Godmother of the SNCC" Ella Baker had hired Cason (now Casey Hayden) for a YWCA special project, travelling to southern campuses to conduct integrated race-relations workshops (secretly in the case of some white schools). She also worked in the SNCC office on, among other projects, preparations for the Freedom Riders who were to challenge non-enforcement of the United States Supreme Court decision Boynton v. Virginia (1960). In December, as Freedom Riders themselves, the Haydens were arrested in Albany, Georgia.

In a dramatic intervention at the National Student Association convention in Minneapolis in August 1960, Cason turned back a broadly supported motion objecting to sit-ins that would have denied support to the fledgling Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). “I cannot say to a person who suffers injustice, ‘Wait,’ And having decided that I cannot urge caution, I must stand with him.” Among the delegates who, after a moments silence, gave her a standing ovation were SDS president Alan Haber, who, as she recalls, "scooped" her up, and Tom Hayden editor of University of Michigan student newspaper. Stirred by her "ability to think morally [and] express herself poetically," he followed her into Haber's new left-wing grouping.

At the SNCC second coordinating conference in Atlanta in October 1960, Cason reported herself transfixed by the idea of the Beloved Community as espoused by James Lawson and Diane Nash of the Nashville Student Movement.

In 1957 Cason enrolled as junior at The University of Texas. She moved out of campus dorms into the Social Gospel and racially integrated Christian Faith and Life Community, and as officer of Young Women's Christian Association and member of the Social Action Committee of the university's Religious Council was soon engaged in civil-rights education and protest. Continuing from 1959 as a UT English and philosophy graduate student, she participated in a successful sit-in campaign to desegregate Austin-area restaurants and theaters.

Sandra Cason "Casey" Hayden (born October 31, 1937), was an American radical student activist and civil rights worker in the 1960s. Recognized for her defense of direct action in the struggle against racial segregation, in 1960 she was an early recruit to Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). With Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in Mississippi Hayden was a strategist and organizer for the 1964 Freedom Summer. In the internal discussion that followed its uncertain outcome, she clashed with the SNCC national executive.

Casey Hayden was born Sandra Cason on October 31, 1937, in Austin, Texas, as a fourth-generation Texan. She was raised in Victoria, Texas, in a "“multigenerational matriarchal family”—by her mother, Eula Weisiger Cason ("the only divorced woman in town"), her mother's sister, and her grandmother. An unconventional arrangement, she believed it cultivated in her from the outset an affinity for those on the margins.