Andrew Goodman (activist)

In her Youth, she helped farm workers to organize and was active in community efforts to support the Republican faction during the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s.

Andrew followed his parents' activist Bent From a young age.

Andrew Goodman (November 23, 1943 – June 21, 1964) was an American civil rights activist.

Andrew Goodman was born on November 23, 1943, in New York City, the second of three boys born to Robert, a writer and civil engineer, and Carolyn Goodman, a psychologist and social activist.

He grew up in the city's Upper East Side.

Goodman was Jewish, like fellow civil rights activist Michael Schwerner, alongside whom Goodman would be murdered.

Goodman's neighborhood was a racially-mixed community of white, black, and Hispanic families.

The Goodman family was involved in intellectual and socially progressive activism and were devoted to social justice.

His mother Carolyn was a lifelong labor activist.

During the march, approximately 10,000 high school age students promoted the desegregation of American public schools after the U.S. Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education landmark decision in 1954 struck down the constitutionality of racial segregation in public schools.

The next year, Goodman and a friend went to West Virginia to live in a coal mining town and sought to advocate to the governor over the poor working conditions there.

At 17, Goodman traveled to Western Europe to understand the impact of largescale agribusiness on small farmers.

At the age of 14, Goodman traveled to Washington, D.C., to participate in the 1958 Youth March for Integrated Schools.

Goodman also participated in a 1960 protest at a New York Woolworth's as part of the sit-in movement protesting the segregationist policies of the five-and-dime store.

In 1961, Goodman graduated high school from the progressive Walden School, where he had attended from the age of 3.

At Walden, he was involved in the theater program.

He also arranged for Brooklyn Dodger Jackie Robinson, a neighbor of his and the first African-American to play in Major League Baseball, to speak at the school.

After Walden, Goodman enrolled the Honors Program at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and considered a drama major, but withdrew after one semester after falling ill with pneumonia.

He returned to New York City to improve his health and was selected for a role in the Off-Broadway play The Chief Thing by Russian dramatist Nikolaí Evreninov.

Goodman then enrolled at Queens College, New York City, and majored in anthropology.

At Queens, he was a friend and classmate of Paul Simon.

He developed an interest in poetry.

One of his poems, "A Corollary to a Poem by A. E. Housman," was posthumously discovered by his college professor Mary Doyle Curran and published in the Massachusetts Review and the New York Times.

With Goodman's brief acting experience, he originally planned to study drama but switched to anthropology.

Goodman's growing interest in anthropology seemed to parallel his increasing political seriousness.

Throughout college, Goodman acted with an Off-Broadway repertory company.

"The senators could not persist in this polite debate over the future dignity of a human race if the white Northerners were not so shockingly apathetic."

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.

In the spring of 1964, his junior year at Queens College, Goodman attended a talk by Mississippi civil rights activists Aaron Henry, head of the state's NAACP branch, and Fannie Lou Hamer.

Henry and Hammer were recruiting students under the age of 21, who with the permission of their parents, would participate in the Freedom Summer project to help register African-Americans to vote in Mississippi and to set up Freedom Schools.

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.

On June 21, their first full day in the state, the trio drove from their home base of Meridian for Philadelphia, a community about an hour from Meridian, to visit the church ruins and meet with church members.

When they were driving back to Meridian, their home base, they were pulled over by Neshoba County, Mississippi Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price (a KKK member), for allegedly driving 65 miles-per-hour in a 30-mile-per-hour speed limit zone.

Price arrested the three men and took them to the Neshoba County jail, where Chaney was booked for speeding, while Schwerner and Goodman were booked "for investigation".

Chaney was charged a $20 fine and the three men were released around 10:30pm on and instructed to leave the county.