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).
Since regarded as a bridge connecting civil rights to women's liberation, Hayden describes its publication as her "last action as a movement activist."
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.
"[5][6] 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.
[7] 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 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.
[9] "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).
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.
[10] 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.
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.
"[14] At the end of the summer, Hayden describes everyone in the movement "reeling from the violence," from the impact of "the new racial imbalance" following the influx of white-student volunteers, and from "the lack of direction and money."
Most of all they were staggered to find the Democratic Party "in the role of racist lunch counter owner refusing entrance to the MFDP at the Atlantic City convention.
Among the Position Papers circulated at Waveland, number 24 ("name withheld by request") opened with the observation that the "large committee" formed to present "crucial constitutional revisions" to the staff "was all men.
"[16] Although Hayden and another Ella Baker YWCA protégé, Mary King, were soon outed as authors, a number of women in the Jackson office contributed to the drafting.
Like Mary King,[20] Judy Richardson recalls the protest as being "half playful (Forman actually appearing supportive), although "the other thing was, we're not going to do this anymore.
With so many women "insensitive" to the "day-to-day discriminations" (who is asked to take minutes, who gets to clean Freedom House), the paper concluded that, "amidst the laughter," further discussion might be the best that could be hoped for.
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.
At first this was toward the project of a Southwide Freedom Summer that, independent of the manpower and publicity of white volunteers,[41] would build a "Black Belt political party" that could write its "own voting bill.
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."
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, 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.
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.
[51][52] In 2010 Hayden spoke out against Arizona SB 1070, a state measure that criminalizes the movement by outlawing the shelter and transport illegal immigrants.
[49] Casey Hayden's civil-rights era papers are curated by the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas at Austin.