A Woman of No Rank (Casey Hayden’s Legacy)

The late Casey Hayden, who died last month, would roll her eyes if she was remembered as a hero of the Civil Rights Movement or an initiator of Second Wave feminism, but truth is truth. Here’s something Casey wrote for First a few years ago. It seems timeless now. No surprise given who wrote it…

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Only Love is Radical

The author wrote this brief Movement memoir in advance of participating in the upcoming conference at the University of Minnesota on the 50th anniversary of The Port Huron Statement [http://www.lsa.umich.edu/phs].

I was a child of small town Texas, and of a single parent mom, a feminist. We were poor closet liberals. Austin was my mecca. I excelled there, in the late fifties, and morphed into an existentialist at a residential community of learning alongside The University, the only integrated housing on campus, both by gender and by race. We met in rigorous seminars with a collegium of renegade Christian ministers, headed by a chaplain from WWII who’d seen the carnage, demythologizing the church fathers and scriptures; studying the contemporary theologians

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