Andrew Goodman

Andrew Goodman was born 23 November 1943 to Robert and Carolyn Goodman in New York City. The Goodmans were an affluent and politically active family. Robert, who worked for his father’s Manhattan construction company, and Carolyn, a psychologist, frequently hosted political figures in their Upper West Side apartment and were particularly interested in supporting those who became targets of the Red Scare.

The Goodmans enrolled Andrew and his two brothers in the progressive and integrated Walden School. There Andrew became intensely interested in issues of racial and economic discrimination. As sophomores in 1958, Goodman and his best friend, Ralph Engleman, decided to participate in the Youth March for Integrated Schools in Washington, DC, organized by Bayard Rustin and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), and they convinced forty other students to attend as well. While the Walden School ultimately organized a bus for all of the other students, Goodman and Ralph were determined to make the journey to the nation’s capital alone on public transportation. On the way, Goodman purposely chose to sit next to a Black man and spent the five-hour trip learning about the stranger’s racial experiences.

The school further supported Goodman and Engleman’s interests in inequity when, as seniors, the two seventeen year olds decided to closely examine the causes of poverty by engaging in fieldwork in the West Virginia coal mining industry. Though child labor laws prohibited the teens from entering a coal mine, as was their aim, they interviewed miners, state congressmen, and representatives of the United Mine Workers’ labor union. Presenting their findings in a school assembly, Goodman and Engleman argued that structural changes within the capitalist system were necessary in order to protect the rights of the poor.

In 1962 Goodman enrolled in Queens College, where he eventually majored in anthropology. While there, Goodman continued to seek effective ways to address racial and economic inequalities. His interests in the civil rights movement and nonviolent direct action were also fed during this period, particularly as Engleman participated in the 1963 protests in Birmingham, Alabama. In addition to learning more about the movement through his friend, Goodman was also inspired by a talk given at Queens College by Aaron Henry, the future president of the Mississippi NAACP. In April 1964 he participated in the CORE demonstration at the 1964 World’s Fair at Flushing Meadow, taking issue with complete absence of the Black experience and the struggle for civil rights at an event themed “Peace through Understanding.” That same month, Goodman attended a presentation at Queens College by Al Lowenstein, a former student activist and member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Lowenstein was recruiting for the Mississippi Summer Project (Freedom Summer), seeking college students to support a massive voter registration and education campaign. Only three students who attended this event applied for the project. One of them was Goodman. In order to serve as part of the project, each volunteer had to have $500 for potential bail money. It was important to Goodman that his parents not provide this funding, so he took a job loading trucks in the early hours of the morning for the United Parcel Service to earn the money while still attending his college classes.

On 14 June 1964, Goodman began his training for Freedom Summer on the Western College for Women campus in Oxford, Ohio. He was scheduled to work the summer in Canton, Mississippi, but changed his mind when news reached Ohio that the Ku Klux Klan had burned Mount Zion Methodist Church in Longdale as retribution for their agreement to host a Freedom School. When Michael Schwerner asked for volunteers to return immediately to Mississippi along with James Chaney and himself, Goodman volunteered and arrived in the state for the first time on Saturday, June 20.

The following morning, Goodman went with Schwerner and Chaney to investigate the situation in Longdale, surveying the destruction of the building and the condition of members who were beaten by Klansmen. That afternoon, the three were arrested by Neshoba County Sheriff’s Deputy Cecil Price who was a member of the Klan. Price held them in the county jail and then released the civil rights workers into a fully formed plot by the Lauderdale and Neshoba County klaverns of the Klan to murder them. Only after an intensive federal investigation were their bodies discovered forty-four days later.

With the death of their son, Andrew Goodman’s parents determined to carry on the work to which their son lost his life. In 1966 they founded the Andrew Goodman Foundation, which continues to support voter registration and civics education through partnerships with college student organizations across the US, including at the University of Mississippi.