Goodman, Andrew, 1943-1964

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 expressed the values for which Andrew Goodman stood, such as 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.

Andrew Goodman (November 23, 1943 – June 21, 1964) was an American civil rights activist. He was one of three Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) workers murdered in Philadelphia, Mississippi by members of the Ku Klux Klan in 1964. Goodman and two fellow activists, James Chaney and Michael Schwerner, were volunteers for the Freedom Summer campaign that sought to register African-Americans to vote in Mississippi and to set up Freedom Schools for black Southerners. born on November 23, 1943 in New York City, In June 1964, Goodman left New York to teach at a Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) training session for Freedom Summer volunteers at the Western College for Women (now part of Miami University) in Oxford, Ohio. In Ohio, Goodman met fellow New Yorker 24 year old Michael Schwerner, an experienced volunteer with CORE, and 21 year old James Chaney, a CORE activist in Mississippi. The three trained hundreds of Freedom Summer volunteers, mostly students, how to navigate the racism and violence they would encounter in Mississippi. At the training, Schwerner learned that one of the Freedom Schools in Mississippi that he had helped to organize at the Mount Zion Methodist Church in Philadelphia had been burned down by the Ku Klux Klan (KKK). To investigate, the three men left Ohio for Mississippi by car on June 20.