Oretha Castle Haley was a vital leader of the civil rights movement in New Orleans—challenging segregated facilities and promoting voter registration in New Orleans and rural Louisiana, all while facing arrest and physical violence. Her civil rights activism began while she was a student at Southern University at New Orleans. During that time, she participated in a boycott and protests organized by the Consumers’ League of Greater New Orleans in response to the racially discriminatory employment practices of Dryades Street merchants.

In 1960 she became a founding member of the New Orleans chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and served as president of the chapter from 1961 through 1964. Throughout the early 1960s, she actively participated in sit-ins, protests, and demonstrations around the city. Her arrest, along with that of three other activists, for participation in a 1960 sit-in at a Canal Street lunch counter, was the basis of a case, Lombard v. Louisiana, that reached the US Supreme Court in 1963. The court overturned the arrests, in a major victory for the civil rights movement.

In 1964 Haley served as a CORE field secretary in Monroe, Louisiana, where, despite the threat of violence, she worked to register African American voters in rural communities. That year she also helped organize the court case that desegregated Charity Hospital in New Orleans, for which her grandmother Callie Castle served as a plaintiff.

In the 1980s, Haley served as an administrator at Charity Hospital, organized the New Orleans Sickle Cell Anemia Foundation, and worked on the political campaigns of African American politicians, including Dorothy Mae Taylor. In 1989 the commercial district of Dryades Street between Philip and Calliope Streets was renamed Oretha Castle Haley Boulevard.