Goodman, Andrew, 1943-1964

Dates:

Birth 1943-11-23

Death 1964-06-21

Birth 1943

Death 1964

Language: English

Biographical notes:

Andrew Goodman, along with hundreds of other students, was a volunteer in the Mississippi Summer Project launched in June 1964 to register black Mississippi residents to vote and to establish Freedom Schools. He along with another white activist, Michael Schwerner and James Chaney, an African-American resident of Mississippi and Project volunteer, were shot to death on June 21, 1964. The disappearance and murder of the three men led to the intervention by President Lynden Baines Johnson and an FBI investigation. By 1967 nineteen members of the Ku Klux Klan were arrested by the FBI and charged with violating the civil rights of the three activists. Forty-one years later, on June 21, 2005 Edgar Ray Killen, a Klan member and part-time preacher, was found guilty of being the mastermind behind these murders.

In 1966 Carolyn and Robert Goodman founded the Andrew Goodman Foundation, in order to use their son's sacrifice for positive ends. From that time until her death in August 2007, Carolyn Goodman directed the Foundation to raise money for and support organizations whose work express the values that Andrew Goodman stood for, including universal civil rights and social justice. Over the years the Foundation has coordinated a number of projects, in particular the Chaney, Goodman, Schwerner Coalition of 1989, which commemorated the twenty-fifth anniversary of Freedom Summer and the death of the three civil rights workers by sponsoring the "Historic South-North Freedom Caravan" in June 1989. Hundreds of people travelled from Philadelphia, Mississippi, the location of the church that had been fire-bombed by the Klan and that the three young men had visited just prior to their murder, to meet with officials and townspeople. This event was used to support additional legislation for voter registration.