Carolyn Goodman (psychologist)

Carolyn Elizabeth Goodman (née Drucker; October 6, 1915 – August 17, 2007) was a clinical psychologist who became a prominent civil rights advocate after her son, Andrew Goodman and two other civil rights workers, James Chaney and Michael Schwerner, were murdered by the Ku Klux Klan in Neshoba County, Mississippi, in 1964.

Politically active until age 90, Goodman came to wide public attention again in 2005. Traveling to Philadelphia, Mississippi, she testified at the murder trial of Edgar Ray Killen, a former Klan leader recently indicted in the case. On June 21, 2005, the 41st anniversary of the killings, a jury acquitted Killen of murder but found him guilty of manslaughter in the deaths of Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner.

Goodman was born in Woodmere, New York and earned a bachelor's degree from Cornell University in 1936, a master’s in clinical psychology from the City University of New York in 1953 and a doctorate in education from Columbia University Teachers College in 1968.

After her marriage to Robert W. Goodman, a civil engineer, in the late 1930s, their apartment became a haven for progressive artists and intellectuals. In the 1950s, the Goodmans were deeply involved in the fight against McCarthyism; Alger Hiss was a guest on occasion. In 1964, Andrew, then a student at Queens College, told his parents he planned to go to Mississippi. “It wasn't easy for us ... But we couldn't talk out of both sides of our mouths. So I had to let him go”, she told The New York Times in 2005.

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