She assisted Wyatt Walker in planning the early portions of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference's involvement in the 1963 Birmingham campaign during the Civil Rights Movement.
[4] Her father was employed as a coal-truck driver from LaGrange, Georgia and her mother, from Chambers County, Alabama, worked as a domestic cook.
[5] In 1963, Haynes began working for the Federal Government under the Social Security Administration, where she became one of the first African Americans to integrate amongst the whites into the workforce.
[5] The ACMHR, led by Shuttlesworth, organized local boycotts and demonstrations as well as coordinating legal challenges to Birmingham's segregation laws in the 1950s and 1960s.
[5] In the Spring of 1963, Hendricks coordinated the practical office requirements and cultivated local contacts for the combined efforts of the ACMHR and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), which Shuttlesworth had co-founded and which was chaired by Martin Luther King Jr. She worked directly with the SCLC's Wyatt Walker during the campaign, helping organize support and logistics for marches and department store boycotts.
[8] The children's book The Youngest Marcher: The Story of Audrey Faye Hendricks, A Young Civil Rights Activist (2017) by Cynthia Levinson, is about that.
[9] Hendricks left her insurance company job in 1963 to join the newly integrated Birmingham office of the Social Security Administration.