August 22, 2007
Carolyn Goodman Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 01:15 PM EST Carolyn Goodman, the mother of the slain civil rights activist Andrew Goodman, died last week in New York at the age of 91. A trained psychologist and emeritus professor of clinical psychiatry at Yeshiva University’s Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Goodman was best known to the world as the grieving parent of one of the three young men whom a lynch mob brutally murdered at the start of Freedom Summer in 1964. In June of that year, Cecil Price, the deputy sheriff of Neshoba County, Mississippi, delivered Andrew Goodman, age 20, James Chaney, age 21, and Michael Schwerner, age 24, into the hands of a lynch mob. Schwerner and Goodman, both Jewish and both from New York City, were each killed at point-blank range by a single bullet to the chest. Chaney was beaten, then shot in the head and chest. The execution party placed the bodies in the trunk of a nondescript sedan and buried them at a remote site where contractors were in the process of erecting an earthen dam out of several tons of muddy, thick red clay. The FBI uncovered their remains on August 4. A few years ago I interviewed Carolyn Goodman at her Upper West Side apartment in New York. At the time, I was considering a book project on the legacy of the Chaney/Schwerner/Goodman murders, and while that project did not ultimately come to fruition, I was able to fold the interview into a long cover article I wrote for the October 2006 edition of American Heritage magazine. Then in her late eighties, Goodman was graceful and resolute. A longtime advocate of improving black-Jewish relations, she also remained a passionate advocate of civil rights. When New York City police officers shot an unarmed Guinean immigrant to death in 1999, Goodman was one of many demonstrators arrested while protesting outside City Hall and Police Headquarters. In later years, Carolyn Goodman would relive the moment when her son announced his decision to participate in Freedom Summer. Neither she nor her husband, Robert Goodman, wanted to see Andy walk into certain danger. “Suddenly,” Carolyn said, “here was Andy ready to commit himself in a most real and perhaps terrifying way to a belief which all our lives we had cultivated in our children. Was I to say, ‘Andy, this is none of your business?’ If my son now felt that a fight for human dignity in Mississippi was his business—was the business of his generation—was I to say, ‘No, no, I lied when I said a person must act on his beliefs. I didn’t mean it.’” Both Carolyn Goodman and Fannie Lee Chaney—James Chaney’s mother—lived to see the mastermind of the murders, Edgar Ray Killen, convicted of state murder charges in 2005. Fannie Lee Chaney died earlier this year.
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