When Andrew Goodman died at 20 in 1964, a Civil Rights worker murdered with two others, Michael Schwerner and Ben Chaney, one white and one black, in rural Mississippi, I was 18. Two years in age and an unimaginable capacity for courage separated us.
Always drawn to causes, especially civil rights, I was entering college, in no way brave enough to take even a summer to go to Mississippi no matter how committed I was to the cause. I’ve always, always admired the values and sense of justice that led these three and so many others south that summer into the kind of hatred and unpredictable peril that, for blacks and civil rights workers, must have felt the way Iraq does now. I also wondered at the values they’d assimilated and at just how they’d become so remarkably brave.
Eight years later we moved to Manhattan from California and I learned about Carolyn Goodman, Andrew’s mother. She had been and remained a stellar figure in left wing New York political circles and a luminous symbol of forgiveness and genuine commitment to justice. Through all the racial turmoil of the 70s and 80s in New York,
Ed Koch’s divisive mayorality,
the Reagan years and what seemed to be the death of much of the city, she stood fast in ways that many who have lost far less, or nothing at all, are not able to demonstrate.
I never met her yet felt somehow close to her; we raised our sons in the same neighborhood that the Goodman boys grew up in and tried, without nearly the example that she set, to impart personal and political ethics and the education to find their own as they grew. I was always aware that she was in the same city – understanding as my sons emerged into themselves just what she’d lost on a level someone who’s never raised kids probably doesn’t experience. To see your child take his place in the world – first the small world of family and school and gradually the larger world of autonomy and work, is an unparalleled privilege and a joy. Her goodness and courage in the face of the loss of these moments was always symbolic to me of what it is possible for human being to be — and of how rarely we reach that point.
She died on Friday, and this Tuesday the story of her funeral appeared in the New York Times. It’s a “select” piece so I hope they’ll forgive me for offering it to you in its complete form. It says this all far better than I have.
August 21, 2007 A Life of Protest and ForgivenesBy CLYDE HABERMAN
Ben Chaney stood to the side
watching mourners fill a grave with the New York soil that gave Carolyn
Goodman her eternal blanket.
It is Jewish custom for family and friends to bury the dead
themselves, instead of leaving the task to hired hands. In life, Dr.
Goodman was hardly an observant Jew. But on Sunday at Mount Judah
Cemetery in Ridgewood, Queens, she exited this world in traditional
style.
Ben Chaney was there to say farewell. “God put his angels here at
the right moment,” he said as clumps of earth thudded across the plain
pine coffin.
The “angels” were his mother, Fannie Lee Chaney, and Carolyn
Goodman, women whose lives might never have converged had it not been
for a brutal June night in 1964 in Neshoba County in Mississippi.
Each lost a son that night. James Chaney, 21, and Andrew Goodman, 20,
disappeared, along with Michael Schwerner, 24. Six weeks later, their
bullet-scarred bodies were found in an earthen dam.
The three civil rights workers.
That’s how they came to be linked for eternity — two white boys from
New York, Mr. Goodman and Mr. Schwerner, and a black kid from
Mississippi, killed for daring to affirm the right of black
Mississippians to vote freely. That right was not universally accepted
in the “freedom summer” of 1964. The deaths of the young men at the
hands of Ku Klux Klan members proved a pivotal moment for the civil rights movement.
Now, life has run its unrelenting course for their parents. Mr.
Schwerner’s mother and father died years ago. Fannie Lee Chaney died in
May at 84. On Friday, time ran out for Carolyn Goodman. She was 91.
“It’s been a rough summer,” said Ben Chaney, who was 12 when his big brother, James, was murdered.
Yes, he repeated: “God put his angels here. They carried a hell of a
burden for a long time. A hell of a burden — knowing that your sons
were murdered and the murderers were out on the streets going free.”
Seven Klan members, convicted of federal civil rights violations,
served but a few years in prison. Decades later, in 2005, an eighth
man, Edgar Ray Killen, was found guilty of manslaughter by a state jury
in Mississippi, and is serving a 60-year term.
“Strong women,” Mr. Chaney said. “They were able to endure, and
continued to have faith. They never lost faith. My mother didn’t, and
neither did Carolyn.”
Dr. Goodman, a clinical psychologist who lived on the Upper West
Side, did many things in her long life. With politics that fell
decidedly leftward, she had taken on liberal causes well before Andrew,
the second of her three sons, was killed. But perhaps inevitably, it is
as Andrew’s mother, a civil rights symbol, that many know her.
There she lay on Sunday, beside her first husband, Robert Goodman,
and in front of a long, swooping headstone marking Andrew’s grave.
Robert Goodman, a civil engineer, died five years after his son’s
murder.
“Everybody says Bobby died of a broken heart,” said Judith Johnson, a family friend.
On Andrew’s headstone, three sets of arms reach toward one another,
above words borrowed from a Stephen Spender poem: “He traveled a short
while towards the sun, and left the vivid air signed with his honor.”
MANY of the 65 people who stood over Dr. Goodman’s grave took turns
remembering her. She was caring but tough, they said. She would hear
out opponents, they said, but not hesitate to speak her mind.
Jane Mark, a relative, told of getting a phone call from Dr. Goodman
in 1999, during the protests and mass arrests over the police killing
of the unarmed Amadou Diallo. “Jane, we’re going to get arrested tomorrow,” Ms. Mark recalled Dr. Goodman as saying.
“On the spur of the moment, she could decide to get arrested,” Ms. Mark said. “But she wanted to have friends with her.”
Stanley Dearman, a former editor and publisher of The Neshoba
Democrat, a Mississippi newspaper that called for justice in the
murders, said Dr. Goodman felt no hatred for the killers. “She was too
fine a person for that,” he said. That point was reinforced by Kalman
Goodman, a grandson of Dr. Goodman.
One day, a man who spoke in a Southern accent went to her apartment
and said he had played a role in Andrew Goodman’s death. He was now
asking for forgiveness.
His grandmother, Mr. Goodman said, told the man: “If you want my
forgiveness, work in your community and help other people. That way
lies forgiveness.”
As far as he knows, the grandson said, the man went home and did just that.
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Tonight begins Rosh Hashanah – the New Year celebration that launches the holy season of the Days of Awe that continues until Yom Kippur – the Day of Atonement. It’s also a huge day for me – in more than one way. Rick and I were married 36 years ago today. On a boat on the Monongahela River. We’ve been through a lot – maybe more than most couples – but we’ve hung on and we’re reaping the rewards of a shared history. So to have this remarkable landmark fall on the eve of a holy day of renewal is really something.
