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Andrew Goodman

1943–1964 · 21 years Specialist

A Queens College anthropology student who never finished his first week in Mississippi

Portrait of Andrew Goodman — 1964 — Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

Andrew Goodman grew up on Manhattan's Upper West Side in a household built around activism — his father a writer and civil engineer, his mother Carolyn a psychologist who devoted her own life to social causes. He marched in the 1958 Youth March for Integrated Schools at 14, joined a Woolworth's sit-in against segregated lunch counters in 1960, and studied anthropology at Queens College, where he was classmates with Paul Simon. In spring 1964 he heard Fannie Lou Hamer and Aaron Henry describe the Mississippi Summer Project, known as Freedom Summer, and signed on to help register Black voters in a state where doing so could get an organizer killed. He was 20 years old.

Goodman trained that June at a Congress of Racial Equality orientation in Oxford, Ohio, where he met Michael Schwerner, an experienced CORE organizer from New York, and James Chaney, a young Mississippi activist. The three drove together to Neshoba County on June 20, 1964, to investigate the Ku Klux Klan's burning of a Black church that had been slated to host a Freedom School. Returning the next day, they were stopped by Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price, a Klan member, on a manufactured speeding charge, held, then released after dark into a Klan ambush arranged while they sat in the jail. All three were shot. An autopsy later found red clay from the burial site in Goodman's lungs and in his clenched fists, evidence that has led some investigators to conclude he was still alive when he was buried.

What made the murders a national story, and not simply the latest Mississippi killing of a civil rights worker, was that two of the three men were white and from New York, a distinction the movement understood clearly and never stopped being uneasy about — Chaney's murder alone, without Goodman and Schwerner, had drawn far less attention when Black organizers were killed in Mississippi before them. The FBI search that followed took 44 days and turned up the three bodies buried in an earthen dam. A 1967 federal trial, brought because Mississippi refused to prosecute murder, convicted seven men including Price on civil rights charges; the man who organized the killing, Edgar Ray Killen, walked free on a hung jury and was not convicted until 2005, forty-one years later, on manslaughter charges that finally stuck.

Goodman's parents founded the Andrew Goodman Foundation in 1966 to continue the voting-rights work their son never got to finish, and it remains active today. In 2002 the Adirondacks named a mountain for him, and Queens College's library now carries a Chaney-Goodman-Schwerner clock tower. In November 2014, fifty years after Freedom Summer, President Obama awarded all three men the Presidential Medal of Freedom posthumously, and Mississippi formally closed the case in 2016. Simon and Garfunkel, Goodman's old college classmate among them, wrote a 1964 song commemorating the three men, a small piece of how they are remembered together rather than separately.

Lifespan

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Andrew Goodman's life against the full span of the corpus.

Notable works

Mississippi Freedom Summer voter registration mission
Joined the project one day before his death 1964
Andrew Goodman Foundation other
Founded by his parents to continue voting-rights work 1966
United States v. Price case
Supreme Court case arising from the murder investigation, upholding federal jurisdiction 1966

Life in brief

with age at each point

November 23, 1943 aged 0 Born in New York City
1958 aged ~15 Joins the Youth March for Integrated Schools in Washington, at 14
June 1964 aged 20 Trains for Freedom Summer at a CORE orientation in Oxford, Ohio Meets Michael Schwerner and James Chaney.
June 21, 1964 aged 20 Murdered with Michael Schwerner and James Chaney in Neshoba County
August 4, 1964 aged 20 Bodies found buried in an earthen dam after a 44-day search
1966 aged ~23 His parents found the Andrew Goodman Foundation
June 21, 2005 aged 61 Edgar Ray Killen convicted of manslaughter, 41 years to the day after the murders
November 2014 aged 70 Posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom