Speech in support of the sit-ins to NSA conference. August 1960
In the Attics of My Mind
The Help, the Movie
Shining in Sunflower, review of Silver Rights
Roots of Feminism in the Redemptive Community
Anniversary of the February 1st, 1960 Sit-ins
A Kind of Memo, (with Mary King)
Sex and Caste , (with Mary King)
Interview about SNCC, by Gretchen Howard. 22 pages. 1994
Mom was the only single parent in the little town in Texas where I grew up, so I was a bit of an outsider from the beginning. She was a University of Texas graduate, and a liberal...so unusual then. My grandfather was the county sheriff. The family had been there since the town's founding.
I made my way to the Movement through the University of Texas Student Y (where I worked on anti segregation efforts in the 50's) and through Connie Curry's seminar for student leaders with the USNSA [United States National Student Association].
I was a founding member of SNCC (and SDS, where I was active, also), worked for Ella Baker on a southwide Y project for a year, mostly to be near SNCC, took the Freedom Ride to Albany, went with my then husband Tom Hayden to Michigan where with Martha Noonan and others set up a Friends of SNCC, came back to Atlanta to start up the Friends of SNCC national program in Atlanta (hi, Dottie and Julian), then to Tougaloo, Mississippi, on a literacy project with Doris Derby and Helen O'Neal and others, and then the Freedom Votes, MFDP, Summer Project, with all the great heroic comrades of that era.
Early efforts at cultural programming and then off to try my hand at organizing white welfare women in Chicago in 1965, SNCC staff on loan to SDS, and then to NYC where I landed. Wrote about women. Took nonviolence seriously. Much direct action along the way.
Since then, administrative and organizing jobs for good causes. Stayed on the margins. Buddhist for a long time. Finally happily married and settled in the wild west and grateful for it. Wonderful kids.
Thanks for this site which I'm finally getting on now that life is short. It sure brings me home. Loved the Movement and everyone in it and always will.
There's an essay in the book, Texas Women, titled "Casey Hayden: Gender and the Origins of SNCC, SDS, and the Women's Liberation Movement."
For more, see my essay "Fields of Blue" in Deep in Our Hearts, Nine White Women in the Freedom Movement.
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