18 Facts About Casey Hayden

Sandra Cason Hayden was an American radical student activist and civil rights worker in the 1960s.

Casey Hayden's vision was of a "radically democratic" movement driven by organizers in the field.

Casey Hayden was born Sandra Cason on October 31,1937, in Austin, Texas, as a fourth-generation Texan.

Casey Hayden 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 engaged in civil-rights education and protest.

Casey Hayden 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.

Casey Hayden's 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 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.

Notwithstanding its subsequent reputation as a link between the Civil Rights Movement and the Women's Movement, and a "key text of second-wave feminism," in what she persisted in calling "A Kind of Memo" Casey Hayden avoided the feminist language that she and her friends had learned from reading Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan and Doris Lessing.

Casey Hayden realized it was "foolhardy" to organize women alone and on her own.

Casey Hayden needed help, and this was motive for revisiting the original memo.

Casey Hayden was at a point at which it was clear that there was no going back to the SNCC she had known.

Casey 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.

In 1986, Casey Hayden was interviewed with regard to Freedom Summer by researchers for the PBS television series Eyes on the Prize.

Casey Hayden studied Zen Buddhism, was active in the home birth movement, and had two children with Donald Campbell Boyce III, a "yogi carpenter" who helped Hayden and others establish the Integral Yoga Institute of San Francisco in 1970.

In 1981, Casey Hayden was back in Atlanta working for the voter-education, voter-registration Southern Regional Council.

In 2010 Casey Hayden spoke out against Arizona SB 1070, a state measure that criminalizes the movement by outlawing the shelter and transport illegal immigrants.

Casey Hayden died in Arizona on January 4,2023, at the age of 85.

Casey Hayden was survived by her son Donald Campbell Boyce IV of Tucson, her daughter Rosemary Lotus Boyce of Los Angeles, and her sister, Karen Beams Hanys of Porter, Texas.