Casey Hayden

Sandra Cason Hayden (October 31, 1937 – January 4, 2023) was an American radical student activist and civil rights worker in the 1960s.

Casey Hayden was born Sandra Cason (a name she continued to use legally) 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.

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.

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).

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.

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 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).

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 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:

"As a Southerner, I considered the Southern Freedom Movement Against Segregation mine as much any one else's. I was working for my right to be with who I chose to be with as I chose to be with them. It was my freedom. However, when I worked full time in the black community I considered myself a guest of that community, which required decency and good manners, as every Southerner knows. I considered myself a support person; my appropriate role was to provide support from behind the lines, not to be a leader in any public way."

It was not that within SNCC she did not have a "right to leadership" but that "it would have been counterproductive."

Not being "a leader in any public way," however, did not leave Hayden feeling in any way excluded.

Although she appears quicker to recognize the advantage it was to her as a woman in the movement than to her as a "guest" in the community, Hayden noted that because of "the participatory, town-hall, consensus-forming nature of the SNCC operation" being "on the Executive Committee or a project director didn't carry much weight anyway."

Her ability to make decisions and to control her own work was not a matter of formal position.

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.

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 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:

I did the work all the way up and down.

That means I did my own typing and mimeographing and mailing and I also did my own research and analysis and writing and decision making, the latter usually in conversation with other staff.

As we said at the time, both about our constituencies and ourselves, "The people who do the work should make the decisions."

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 the decades that followed, she continued to acknowledge the civil-rights struggle of the era as the forerunner for women, and for all those, who have taken up "the idea of organising for themselves."