[Marxism] Carolyn Goodman

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

NY Times, August 18, 2007
Carolyn Goodman, Rights Champion, Dies at 91
By MARGALIT FOX

Carolyn Goodman, a Manhattan clinical psychologist who became a 
nationally prominent civil rights advocate after her son Andrew and two 
other civil rights workers were murdered by the Ku Klux Klan in 
Mississippi in 1964, died yesterday at her home on the Upper West Side. 
She was 91.

Dr. Goodman, who had suffered a series of strokes and seizures in recent 
weeks, died of natural causes, her son David said. At her death, she was 
assistant clinical professor emeritus of psychiatry at Albert Einstein 
College of Medicine of Yeshiva University in the Bronx.

Politically active until she was 90, Dr. Goodman came to wide public 
attention again two years ago. Traveling to Philadelphia, Miss., 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 Mr. Killen of murder but found him guilty 
of manslaughter in the deaths of Andrew Goodman, James Chaney and 
Michael Schwerner.

In the summer of 1964, Mr. Goodman and Mr. Schwerner, two white 
Northerners, and Mr. Chaney, a black Mississippian, converged in Neshoba 
County, Miss. They were there to take part in Freedom Summer, a campaign 
to register black Mississippians to vote. On June 21, they disappeared.

 From the moment the disappearance was made public, Dr. Goodman was in 
the spotlight, facing batteries of television cameras outside her 
apartment on West 86th Street as she pleaded for Mississippians, and all 
Americans, to help in the search. On Aug. 4, the bodies of the three men 
were found in an earthen dam near Philadelphia. All had been shot.

The fate of the three young men — Mr. Goodman was 20, Mr. Chaney 21, Mr. 
Schwerner 24 — was widely seen as helping inspire the historic civil 
rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Ala., in 1965, and the passage of 
the Voting Rights Act the same year.

A slender, elegant woman with sleek short hair, Dr. Goodman remained for 
decades a highly visible political presence. As she repeatedly made 
plain, she was not seeking revenge. (To the end of her life, she 
publicly opposed capital punishment.) She was, rather, agitating to see 
justice done — not only for her son and his colleagues, but on a wide 
range of issues.

In 1966, Dr. Goodman and her husband, Robert Goodman, started the Andrew 
Goodman Foundation, which supports a variety of social causes. Over the 
years, she took a prominent part in antiwar demonstrations, lectured 
often to student and religious groups and marched in civil rights 
rallies of all kinds.

In a telephone interview yesterday, her son David recounted a 
characteristic incident, which happened in 1999, during the public 
protest over the death of Amadou Diallo, the Guinean immigrant shot and 
killed by New York police officers. A colleague came into Mr. Goodman’s 
office to tell him that his mother had just been seen on television, 
being taken off to jail.

“I said, ‘Well, that happens from time to time,’ ” Mr. Goodman recalled.

Carolyn Elizabeth Drucker was born in Woodmere, N.Y., on Oct. 6, 1915. 
Her father, Edward, a lawyer, was concerned with social causes: he hired 
one of the first black lawyers to work in a white New York firm, David 
Goodman said yesterday. Carolyn earned a bachelor’s degree in home 
economics 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.

Her political involvement began early: at Cornell, she helped organize 
local farmers’ cooperatives. In the late 1930s, she served on a 
committee that aided Spanish Republicans exiled during the Spanish Civil 
War.

After her marriage to Robert W. Goodman, a civil engineer, in the late 
1930s, their sprawling, book-lined 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. They were also avid supporters of the arts, organizing 
benefits for the New York Philharmonic and other organizations. (One of 
David Goodman’s childhood memories, he said yesterday, was of hearing a 
visiting Leonard Bernstein play the family piano.)

In this heady environment, the Goodmans’ three sons, Jonathan, Andrew 
and David, grew up. In 1964, Andrew, then a student at Queens College, 
told his parents he planned to go to Mississippi.

“It wasn’t easy for us,” Dr. Goodman told The New York Times in 2005. 
“But we couldn’t talk out of both sides of our mouths. So I had to let 
him go.”

As Andrew was about to leave, Dr. Goodman slipped iodine and bandages 
into his duffel bag, in case he was roughed up in the South. Neither one 
of them, she said afterward, could conceive of anything much beyond that.

In 1967, a federal jury in Meridian, Miss., convicted seven Klansmen of 
conspiracy in the deaths of the three civil rights workers. None served 
more than six years. In January 2005, Mr. Killen, who in 1967 was 
released in one of the federal trials as a result of a hung jury, was 
arrested and charged with murder by the State of Mississippi.

At his trial, Dr. Goodman read a postcard her son wrote on June 21, 
1964, the last day of his life.

“Dear Mom and Dad,” it read, “I have arrived safely in Meridian, Miss. 
This is a wonderful town, and the weather is fine. I wish you were here. 
The people in this city are wonderful, and our reception was very good. 
All my love, Andy.”

Robert Goodman died of a stroke in 1969 at 54; Dr. Goodman’s second 
husband, Joseph Eisner, whom she married in 1972, died in 1992. She is 
survived by her sons David, of Upper Saddle River, N.J., and Jonathan, 
of Tel Aviv; nine grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.

Mr. Chaney’s mother, Fannie Lee Chaney, died in May. Mr. Killen is 
currently serving a 60-year sentence.

As a psychologist, Dr. Goodman specialized in creating early 
intervention programs for families at risk of psychiatric problems. She 
developed and ran the PACE Family Treatment Center, a program for 
emotionally disturbed mothers of young children, at the Bronx 
Psychiatric Center. Her articles were published widely in prominent 
professional journals.

But it was as Andrew Goodman’s indomitable mother that Dr. Goodman 
remained best known. She was interviewed repeatedly about her son’s 
case, often speaking from the apartment where she had raised him, where 
pictures of Andrew were visible everywhere.

“I still feel that I would let Andy go to Mississippi again,” Dr. 
Goodman told The Times in 1965, a year after his death. “Even after this 
terrible thing happened to Andy, I couldn’t make a turnabout of 
everything I believe in.”

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