Self-Written Obituary
[Dorothy Burlage was sent the following obituary for Casey Hayden, that Casey wrote.]
Obituary, written by Casey:Casey Hayden, one of the few white Southerners to join the anti segregation movement of the 60's in the South, and a widely recognized precursor of the women's liberation movement, died on 1/4/23 with her children holding her hands.
Born Sandra Cason, a name she continued to use legally, she was the child of divorced Texas liberals, William Charles Cason and Eula Weisiger Cason Beams. Raised by her grandparents and her single mother in Victoria, Texas, she was fourth generation, her grandfather the county sheriff. She attended local public schools, Victoria Junior College, and the University of Texas, where she graduated with honors as a member of Mortarboard, the senior women's honorary society. An activist and a student leader in the Campus YWCA locally and nationally, she was as well a scholar/resident of the radical Christian existentialist Christian Faith and Life Community.
She was swept up into the 60's by the student sit-in movement of black college students in the deep South, starting February 1, 1960, which she joined as a graduate student. Following a 6 week summer residential training for Southern campus leaders sponsored by the Field Foundation and the United States National Student Association, she spoke for civil disobedience at the National Congress of USNSA, quoting Thoreau and swinging support to the new Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.
She organized stand ins at the local University movie theatre and other UT anti-segregation efforts; met and married Tom Hayden; took a travelling job organizing illegal integrated workshops with the Southern Region of the Campus YWCA, working for the iconic Ella Baker and with SNCC in Atlanta, from whence she took the last Freedom Ride, to Albany, Georgia, as undercover observer.
She was a founding member of Students for a Democratic Society and the connection between SDS and SNCC; attended the Port Huron Conference; and served as first Northern Coordinator of SNCC, creating nationwide student support. In 1963 she moved to Mississippi to research and train staff for the challenge to the seating of the all white Mississippi delegation by the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party at the 1964 Atlantic City convention; took up photography as first woman in SNCC to do so, and co-authored two papers which are widely credited with launching women's liberation and second wave feminism.
After the South, she joined the counter culture, establishing a commune in Vermont with other Southern movement dropouts and then the first yoga center in San Francisco with the father of her children, Donald C. Boyce III, as well as the home-birth movement in which she bore two children.
She was an early student of Tibetan Buddhism, followed by 20 years of zen. Working for the City of Atlanta under Andrew Young, she recovered in Twelve Step programs. She moved to Tucson in the late 80's; started her own business, Zendo Cleaning; and married the activist Episcopal priest Rev. Paul W. Buckwalter whom she met through the Dalai Lama. They travelled statewide creating Arizona Interfaith on behalf of the excluded and needy and at home reconstructed an abandoned house in the old black ghetto and created a permaculture landscape. Her latter years were among her happiest.
An iconic figure in her youth, and a fine writer, she contributed to and appears in many historical books about the sixties. Her story is told by Harold Smith 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 in her own words in the essay Fields of Blue in the volume she organized, DEEP IN OUR HEARTS, NINE WHITE WOMEN IN THE FREEDOM MOVEMENT, UGA Press 2000.
She was preceded in death by her beloved husbands, and survived by her son Donald Campbell Boyce IV of Tucson, her daughter Rosemary Lotus Boyce of Los Angeles, and her sister, Karen Beams Hanys of Porter, Texas. Her ashes are her children's.
February 4, 2023
Casey In New York (late 1970s)
Casey
Lives in a warehouse
Upstairs loft
Not an 'in-crowd' loft.
A real warehouse loft.
2'x8' planks worn in the middle with big cracks between.
Other warehouses framed in windows.
A window box with a sad healing plant
And a small new shoot of marijuana.
It looked like tentative steps out of a hiding place.She was thin.
I needed something to sit,
to grab hold of,
so I wouldn't stare.
I sat at the table
gratefully accepting a cup of coffee."We were refugees from the destruction of our 'beloved community'" she said
She was also a refugee from domestic abuse.
'because of the children'....15 years ago
Remembering our long breakfasts
When freedom fighters
Took off battle trappings on Sunday mornings,
wanting some corner of peace in our lives.Casey's blue berry muffins
Coffee filtered through paper towels
...And unburnt bacon.
"Northerners don't know how to cook bacon
They have no patience"
(Heard to this day, every time I cook bacon)
Our Sunday morning attempts at some sort of normal.But Today:
"I can't live here
I don't belong here
But I have no place to go back to."Afterwards, I wrote
"Casey de Tejas
Cornflower blue eyes
A slender slip
Sprouting up between Manhattan rock
Keep your petals alive
Keep alive..."She found a way to leave,
eventually back to the Southwest
where healing plants thrive.Last year
Casey sent me "The Blessings of Space Between us" (John O'Donoghue)
I read it
looking for the blessings in our spaces.
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