The Challenges of Historical Biography: The Case of Casey Hayden

The proposed paper will be a presentation of a work in progress. My current project is a historical biography of Casey Hayden, who was born in Texas in 1937 and died in 2023. Hayden featured as a major figure in a previous study I published in 2015, Unlikely Dissenters: White Southern Women in the Fight for Racial Justice (1920-1970) (University Press of Florida). My new research aims at putting her personal life in historical perspective within the frame of the social movements she contributed to—the nonviolent civil rights movement; the New Left; and the so-called second wave of feminism. As of now, my research hinges on Hayden’s place, role, and historical significance in relation to those 3 major movements in the US. I will discuss more specifically some of the challenges inherent in the writing of an academic biography. In the case of Casey Hayden, her life trajectory complicates the research, as she was first an inspiration for major social movements activists but withdrew quite early from activism and public life, and became estranged from these movements as the years went by. As a result, she paradoxically remained an iconic figure in the memory of 1960s activists, while distancing herself from the latter and contesting several interpretations of the 1960s’ collective experience. One major difficulty in the writing of her biography is the scarcity of sources produced during her later life—after she withdrew from the movements she had contributed to launch. This is all the more challenging as Hayden expressed a will to control her image and legacy, which shows in the collection of papers she donated to the Briscoe Center for American History of the University of Texas, Austin. She actually selected personal documents and writings she deemed of interest for historians, annotating them to construct her own interpretation of her life, and including a self-written obituary to be circulated after her death. The aim of the present research is to assess Hayden’s historical legacy in the most accurate way possible without betraying her. Beyond the usual fact-checking inherent in all history work, this will require negotiating with several subjectivities, based on her publications, her personal unpublished papers, and the many accounts and testimonies of the people who interacted with her.

Anne Stefani is a Professor of U.S. History and American Studies at the University of Toulouse – Jean Jaurès. She is a specialist of the segregated South and the long civil rights movement. Her research focuses more specifically on the white southern women who contributed to the anti-racist movement in their region. Her book, Unlikely Dissenters: White Southern Women in the Fight for Racial Justice, 1920-1970 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2015) explores the intersection of gender, race, and regional identity in the southern United States. She is currently working on a biography of Casey Hayden. Her latest publications explore the interconnected dynamics of race, history, and memory in contemporary American culture.