Andrew Goodman Biography
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Andrew Goodman (November 23, 1943 – June
21, 1964) was a Jewish-American civil rights activist who was murdered
by gunshot in 1964.
He was born and raised in New York City,
one of three sons of Robert and Carolyn Goodman, in an intellectual and
socially-aware family. An activist from the age of 15, he graduated from
the progressive Walden School there. He then attended the University of
Wisconsin for a year, transferring to Queens College, New York City,
where he was a classmate of Paul Simon. With his brief experience as an
off-Broadway actor, he originally planned to study drama, but switched
to anthropology. In 1964 he volunteered, along with fellow activist
Mickey Schwerner, to work as part of the "Freedom Summer" project to
register blacks to vote in Mississippi. He was trained, along with
Schwerner, at Western College for Women [now part of Miami University]
in Oxford, Ohio. In mid-June of 1964 Goodman and Schwerner were sent to
Mississippi and began to register blacks to vote.
On the night of June 20, 1964 the two
reached Meridian. There, they were joined by a black man named James
Chaney, who himself was a civil rights activist. On the morning of June
21, 1964 the three of them set out for Philadelphia, Neshoba County,
where they were to investigate the recent burning of a local black
church, the Mount Zion Methodist Church.
The three (Chaney, Schwerner and Goodman)
were initially arrested by Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price for an alleged
traffic violation and taken to the jail in Neshoba County. They were
released that evening and on the way back to Meridian were stopped by
two carloads of KKK members on a remote rural road. The men approached
their car and then shot and killed Schwermer, then Goodman, and finally
Chaney
Eventually the Neshoba County deputy
sheriff and conspirators were convicted by Federal prosecutors of civil
rights violations, but were never convicted of murder. The case formed
the basis of the made-for-TV movie Murder in Mississippi and the film
Mississippi Burning.
On August 4, 1980, Ronald Reagan launched
his presidential election campaign with a speech in Philadelphia,
Mississippi in which he declared his support for states' rights. Some
critics saw his choice of Philadelphia as the launching point for his
campaign as an attempt to further the Republican Party's southern
strategy.
On September 14, 2004 the Mississippi State
Attorney General Jim Hood announced that he was gathering evidence for a
charge of murder and intended to take the case to a grand jury. On
January 7, 2005, Edgar Ray Killen was arrested and found guilty of
manslaughter - not murder - on June 21, 2005, exactly 41 years to the
day after the murders.
Goodman Mountain, a 2,176 foot peak in the
Adirondack Mountain town of Tupper Lake, NY, where he and his family
spent their summers, is named in Andrew Goodman's memory. And the Simon
& Garfunkel song "He Was My Brother" was dedicated to him.
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URL of Original Article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Goodman
Date Article Copied:
March 17, 2006
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