Casey Hayden Obituary, Death – Casey Hayden of Victoria, Texas has died. Few white Southerners joined the anti-segregation movement in the 1960s, including Casey Hayden. She pioneered women’s liberation. Her children held her when she died on January 23. Texas-born Sandra Cason preserved her name legally. Liberal parents William Charles Cason and Eula Weisiger Cason Beams divorced.
Victoria, Texas, was her home. Her grandfather was the county sheriff. She attended local public schools, Victoria Junior College, and the University of Texas, where she graduated with honors in Mortarboard, the senior women’s prestigious society. She was a scholar and resident of the radical Christian existentialist Christian Faith and Life Community and a local and national Campus YWCA activist and student leader. She entered the 1960s with the February 1, 1960, deep South black college student sit-in movement. Graduate student she joined the movement. She advocated for civil disobedience at the USNSA National Congress after a six-week Field Foundation and USNSA training program for Southern college leaders.
She quoted Henry David Thoreau to endorse the new Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. She led UT movie theater sit-ins and other anti-segregation initiatives. Tom Hayden married her. She organized unlawfully integrated Campus YWCA workshops for Ella Baker and SNCC in Atlanta. She then surreptitiously observed the last Freedom Ride to Albany, Georgia. She connected SDS and SNCC. She attended the Port Huron Conference and was the first Northern Coordinator for SNCC, helping students across get involved. She moved to Mississippi in 1963 to research and prepare the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party’s 1964 Atlantic City convention challenge to the all-white Mississippi delegation. She was SNCC’s first female photographer and co-wrote two papers that many feel initiated women’s liberation and second-wave feminism.
She embraced the counterculture and founded a Vermont commune with other ex-Southerners. With her children’s father, Donald C. Boyce III, she created San Francisco’s first yoga facility and participated in the home birth movement, having two children. She first studied Tibetan Buddhism. Zen was her 20-year study. She worked for Atlanta under Andrew Young after Twelve Step programs helped her. In the late 1980s, she moved to Tucson, launched Zendo Cleaning, and married Rev. Paul W. Buckwalter, an activist Episcopal priest she met through the Dalai Lama. They helped outcasts around the state.
They built a permaculture garden in an abandoned black ghetto house. Her later years were her happiest. She wrote well and was famous in her youth. Many 1960s history books acknowledge her writing. Harold Smith tells her story in the essay Casey Hayden: Gender and the Origins of SNCC, SDS, and the Women’s Liberation Movement in the book TEXAS WOMEN, THEIR HISTORIES, THEIR LIVES, University of Georgia Press, 2015, and she tells it herself in the essay Fields of Blue in the book she put together, DEEP IN OUR HEARTS, NINE WHITE WOMEN IN THE FREEDOM MOVEMENT, Her beloved husbands predeceased her.
Her son Donald Campbell Boyce IV of Tucson, daughter Rosemary Lotus Boyce of Los Angeles, and sister Karen Beams Hanys of Porter, Texas survive her. Her children have her ashes.