Andrew Goodman
| Andrew Goodman | |
|---|---|
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| Born |
Andrew Goodman November 23, 1943 New York City |
| Died | June 21, 1964 (aged 20) Mississippi, U.S. |
| Cause of death | Murder |
Andrew Goodman (November 23, 1943 – June 21, 1964) was one of three American activists of the Civil Rights Movement and also a Social Worker, murdered near Philadelphia, Mississippi, during Freedom Summer in 1964 by members of the Ku Klux Klan.
Andrew Goodman was born and raised on the Upper West Side of New York City, at 161 West 86 Street. He was the second of three boys born of Robert and Carolyn Goodman, and of Jewish heritage. His family and community were steeped in intellectual and socially progressive activism and were devoted to social justice. An activist at an early age, Goodman graduated from the progressive Walden School, which was said to have had a strongly formative influence on his outlook. He attended the Honors Program at the University of Wisconsin–Madison for a semester but withdrew after falling ill with pneumonia.
Goodman then enrolled at Queens College, New York City, where he was a friend and classmate of Paul Simon. With Goodman's brief experience as an Off-Broadway actor, he originally planned to study drama but switched to anthropology. Goodman's growing interest in anthropology seemed to parallel his increasing political seriousness.
In 1964, Goodman volunteered along with fellow activists Mickey Schwerner, his wife Rita Schwerner Bender, and James Chaney to work on the "Freedom Summer" project of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) to register blacks to vote in Mississippi. Having protested U.S. President Lyndon Johnson's presence at the opening of that year's World's Fair, Goodman left New York to train and develop civil rights strategies at Western College for Women (now part of Miami University) in Oxford, Ohio. In mid-June, Goodman joined Schwerner in Meridian, Mississippi, where the latter was designated head of the field office. They worked on registering blacks in rural areas to vote.
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