Organzing and power
When Hayden came on staff with SNCC in the fall of 1963, she became a vocal proponent of grassroots leadership.[31] Minutes from a December 1963 meeting show “Casey Hayden stated that the staff was supposed to service the base.” As as she developed Northern allies into the official “friends of SNCC, she emphasized the need to “to involve Negroes in the support groups.”[2] This recommendation is consistent with that made by Ruby Doris Robinson at that same meeting, that “some field situations [are] overloaded with white workers … and we are not making a real effort to recruit Negroes” (page 3).
As an advocate for the group-centered leadership and a proponent for letting the people involved make the decisions, Hayden saw her role as a white woman organizing in the south as a very specific one. An article in the New York Times shortly before the start of Freedom Summer explained her views.
Mrs. Sandra Hayden… conceded that white girls would find their task more difficult than would boys. Only a few girls will take part in registration activities. Most have been assigned to “freedom schools,” community centers or to office work in the larger cities. The major problem encountered by white women, Mrs. Hayden said, “is the psychological strain of knowing that you endanger the people you are around.”
While Hayden was willing to put her body on the line, and did so, as a native to the segregated South, she was well aware that white women’s presence brought danger to others in the movement, something she was unwilling to risk.
Although she did not work in the field, she remained an acknowledged "top person" in SNCC nonetheless and her views were regarded as relevant.
As debates over structure emerged in SNCC, Hayden continued to advocate for a decentralized, bottom up organization. In a “Memorandum on Structure," written for the same 1964 SNCC staff retreat as the better known position paper on women, her plans to work with poor whites in Chicago.
In the fall of 1965, Hayden attended her last meetings for SNCC. She continued to support decentralized leadership. She was "Happy over suggestion of committee, SNCC can work in smaller group better. Suggestion: Working in committees in future meetings"[1] However, minutes from another staff meeting that fall also reveal Hayden “hadn't spoken because no one would have listened,” a experience that must have been painful. Furthermore, notes also reflect that when Hayden challenged SNCC chairman Jim Forman about the “imbalance of power in SNCC” specifically that in order for it to be “radically democratic” he needed to step down, he responded with a blanket statement about the movement needing to be “controlled, dominated, and led by black people.” As SNCC moved from its original group leadership philosophy, advocacy for the older approach become tangled up with the emergence of black power.
[2] Minutes from the September 6-9 1963 executive committee session of SNCC
http://www.crmvet.org/docs/6309_sncc_excom.pdf
http://womhist.alexanderstreet.com/SNCC/doc86A.htmhttp://www.crmvet.org/docs/6511_sncc_staff_min.pdf
FN Julian Bond recalled in an interview during the late 1960s that Bob and Dona Moses were in the "loose structure" faction along with white staff members like “ Mary King, Mendy Samstein, Casey Hayden, Mike Sayer." He also noted however, that "the people who tended to be against whites in the organization were the most likely to be tight-structure people.”