ABSTRACT
An anonymous white paper later attributed to Casey Hayden and Mary King compared women’s statuses in SNCC to that of Blacks in society writ large: “assumptions of male superiority are as widespread and deep rooted and every much as crippling to the woman as the assumptions of white supremacy are to the Negro” (1965, ¶13). However, as accounted by Carson (1995), these concerns were dismissed as tangential. Leadership in SNCC saw issues raised in the position paper as trivial. In fact, several Black women saw their role within the organization as disconrming of sexism. e dismissal of this concern was addressed in the paper:
maybe sometime in the future the whole of the women in this movement will become so alert as to force the rest of the movement to stop the discrimination and start the slow process of changing values and ideas so that all of us gradually come to understand that this is no more a man’s world than it is a white world.
