the left-wing grouping. They married in October the following year. Undeterred at having been beaten senseless by a white mob in McComb, Mississippi, while covering the Freedom Rides for the National Student News, Hayden himself became a Freedom Rider. On December 10, 1961, the Haydens participated in one of the many “freedom rides” taking place in response to the 1960 Boynton v. Virginia decision. It was from a prison cell in Albany, Georgia, where their ride was to land him, that Hayden began writing the SDS manifesto. The Port Huron vision and SDS Refined and adopted at the first Students for Democratic Society (SDS) convention in June 1962, the Port Huron Statement called for a "new left" committed, in the spirit of participatory democracy, to "deliberativeness, honesty [and] reflection." The sponsoring League for Industrial Democracy (LID) took immediate issue. Although The Statement did express regret at the "perversion of the older left by Stalinism," it omitted the LID's standard denunciation of communism. Hayden was called to a meeting where, refusing any further concession, he clashed with Michael Harrington, as he later would with Irving Howe. Tom Hayden was elected SDS president for the 1962–1963 academic year, but his wife Sandra Cason "Casey" Hayden left Ann Arbor, and left him, heeding the call to return to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in Atlanta. She later recalled that in contrast to the interminable debates she had witnessed in Ann Arbor, in SNCC discussions the focus was on action and women had a voice. The Haydens divorced in 1965. That year, with other SNCC women, Casey Hayden coauthored "Sex and Caste" since regarded as a founding document of second-wave feminism. Convinced, in the words of the Statement, that students must "look outwards to the less exotic but more lasting struggles for justice," and with $5000 from United Automobile Workers, Hayden's first SDS initiative was the Economic Research and Action Project (ERAP). SDS community organizers would help draw white neighbourhoods into an "interacial movement of the poor". By the end of 1964 ERAP had ten inner-city projects engaging 125 student volunteers. President of the United Packinghouse Workers of America Ralph Helstein arranged for Hayden to meet with Saul Alinsky. With twenty-five years experience in Chicago and across the country, Alinsky was considered the father of community organizing. To Helstein's dismay, Alinsky dismissed Hayden's venture into the field as naive and doomed to failure.