Andrew Goodman
Age 21
A white college student who helped register Black people to vote
Philadelphia, Mississippi
June 21, 1964
"It was a coming of age moment that I wouldn't wish on anybody."
David Goodman & Jerry Mitchell
Brother of Goodman and Journalist
START
JM: Andy seemed to be driven from a pretty early age to care for the underdog, to care for the impoverished, for Black Americans. What drove Andy?
DG: His view of the world was things should be fair. When he was in college, he announced to the family he wanted to go to Mississippi. He had heard that in Mississippi, particularly if you were Black, the power structure wouldn’t let you vote. And he said, “I want to do something about it. So I’m volunteering to go there and work with the Black leadership,” in the height of the civil rights movement, 1964.
JM: And so he goes down and obviously he’s part of a bigger movement here that’s at stake. Almost a thousand, largely college students, that came down to Ohio for training, and then goes down to Mississippi. What do you remember about that summer of ‘64?
DG: When he left, I didn’t think anything of it. I was 17 and I had never heard, nor did anyone tell me, that white people murdered Black people in many parts of the country. I did not know that and I don’t think any of my white friends knew that.
So when my brother went to Mississippi, which was the first official day of what they call Mississippi Freedom Summer, the sheriff arrested them in the afternoon, on charges of speeding or some nonsense, and let them out at 10 o’clock at night or thereabouts. And the Klan was waiting for them.
Monday, the next morning, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, called my mother and said these three civil rights workers, your son included, have a rule that they got to call in by 4:00 p.m. every day when they go out in the field just as a check in. And they didn’t.
They were missing for 44 days. And I didn’t know what that meant. But I found out. It was a coming of age moment that I wouldn’t wish on anybody. The FBI found the bodies on August 4th, 15 feet under the ground in a dam that was under construction. They identified 20 of the posse that murdered them and three years later brought them to a federal court. Never were they indicted for murder. It was a gross miscarriage of justice.
JM: Talk about the trial in 2005.
DG: Edgar Ray Killen was physically not at the scene of the crime. He was an organizer.
JM: He orchestrated this. He was a recruiter for the Klan.
DG: Right. They couldn’t convict him on murder and they got him on manslaughter. I mean, to think that that ended up in manslaughter is itself a testimony to how ingrained racism is in this country. He arranged the murder, was an accomplice to the murder, and he got manslaughter rather than murder. But he was put in jail. At least somebody was convicted, although none of the others who were physically there ever were convicted.
There’s a part of America that has people in it who are so arrogant, so undemocratic, treating other people poorly and unfairly because of the color of their skin. It’s the underbelly of our democracy, and we’re facing the same thing this very day as we’re speaking. When you have a perspective of half a century and you do see many good changes and you see backsliding into the heart of darkness, it’s very disturbing.
JM: As you mentioned, this is within our lifetimes and to have people that have grown up and consider themselves educated and yet they don’t know this history. We struggle with that as a country and sometimes personally as well. So it’s something that I think is important if we want to heal as a nation, that we have to understand our past in order to move beyond our past.
END
Photo of Jerry by Blair Parker Ballou. (Left) Photo of David courtesy of The Andrew Goodman Foundation. (Right)
As a college student studying anthropology, New Yorker Andrew Goodman became increasingly frustrated with the state of U.S. race relations. “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 wrote in a school paper in 1964. Shortly after he wrote those words, Goodman’s parents gave him permission to travel to Mississippi for Freedom Summer, a voter registration drive aimed at growing the number of registered Black voters in the state.
Goodman met up with a handful of other young civil rights workers — 21-year-old James Chaney, 24-year-old Michael Schwerner and 22-year-old Rita Schwerner — who were working to register Black voters in and around the town of Meridian. According to a Department of Justice memo on the case, the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, a chapter of the violent white supremacist organization, was so outraged by such efforts that local members had discussed killing Michael Schwerner. State Klan leader Sam Bowers eventually gave authorization for them to do so, the DOJ memo said.
On June 21, 1964 — Goodman’s first day on the job — he travelled with Chaney and Michael Schwerner to a community near the town of Philadelphia, Mississippi, about an hour from Meridian, to visit the victims of a Klan attack on a Black church. On the way back, they were pulled over by the Neshoba County deputy sheriff, Cecil Price, a Klan member, allegedly for driving over the speed limit.
Price arrested the three men and took them to the Philadelphia jail, where he booked Chaney for speeding and held Schwerner and Goodman for investigation. According to information later gathered by law enforcement officials, Price then contacted local Klan leader Edgar Ray Killen, a minister, to tell him he had the three young men in custody. Killen gathered other Klan members and came up with a plot to attack Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman as they left the jail, according to the DOJ memo. Killen reportedly asked to be dropped off in town so he would have an alibi, leaving the others to execute his plan.
At about 10:30 p.m., Price charged Chaney a $20 speeding fine and escorted the three civil rights workers to their station wagon, telling them to “see how quickly they could get out of Neshoba County,” according to the DOJ memo.
Chaney, Schwerner and Goodman immediately headed for Meridian but soon had three cars on their tail: Price’s patrol car and two others full of Klansmen. Price caught up to the men after a high-speed chase and pulled them over once more. The Klansmen then forced Chaney, Schwerner and Goodman into Price’s patrol car and drove them to an isolated location. There, according to the DOJ memo, they shot and killed the three young men. They used a bulldozer to bury the bodies in an earthen dam on a farm owned by another Klansman and set the station wagon ablaze in a swampy area near the highway, the memo stated.
Initial Investigation
Justice Department attorneys had been collaborating with civil rights workers to investigate voter suppression in Mississippi, according to the DOJ memo, and the three men were quickly reported missing. The FBI launched a search within a day, and federal officials confronted Price, who said he had no knowledge of what happened to the men after he released them from jail. The following day, the scorched station wagon was recovered in the swamp.
The FBI conducted approximately 1,000 interviews over summer and fall 1964, developing key sources within the Klan. Eventually, a confidential source told the FBI where to find the bodies.
Local law enforcement led a parallel investigation, but there were no state or local criminal charges at the time. Instead, after a lengthy legal fight, a federal grand jury in 1967 indicted 19 suspects on one criminal civil rights conspiracy charge. One hundred and fifty-one witnesses testified in the trial, the majority of whom offered character and alibi evidence for the defendants. In October 1967, seven defendants, including Price, were convicted. Eight were found not guilty. Three cases, including Killen’s, ended in mistrial. Of the seven people who were found guilty, two received 10-year prison sentences, while the others were sentenced to between three and six years in prison.
In 1998, investigative journalist Jerry Mitchell obtained the transcript of a secret taped interview in which a Klan leader divulges that the “the main instigator” behind the killings, Killen, was walking free. His reporting revived interest in the case.
In 2000, federal officials persuaded Price to provide incriminating information against Killen. Price died before he could testify, but the FBI helped state officials gather enough evidence to indict Killen on three counts of murder. In 2005, after an eight-day trial, a Neshoba County jury convicted Killen on three counts of manslaughter. He died in prison in 2018.
After Goodman was murdered, his family established the Andrew Goodman Foundation, a nonprofit focused on civic engagement and voting rights. The organization remains active, more than 50 years after the man it was named after was killed.
Till Act Status
In 2010, the Department of Justice reopened the case, working closely with then Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood, who would likely prosecute the case if a suspect were identified. Agents reviewed the investigative files, read through the transcripts of the two major court cases, and searched for witnesses to determine who might still be alive and where they were located. The FBI then launched “several covert operations” to gather more information about the murders, but the efforts produced “neither inculpatory admissible evidence against any subject, nor any reliable, credible exculpatory evidence,” according to a DOJ memo. Only five of the original suspects were still alive at the time; at least three have since died.
The DOJ determined it did not have enough evidence for any federal prosecutions but shared its findings with state investigators. In 2016, then Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood also closed the case.
Case Status closed
Closed 06/20/2016
Themes
- Closed Cases
- Closed with Living Subject
- Deaths Involving Law Enforcement
- Men
- Prosecuted Cases
- Storycorps Stories
About the Project
This multiplatform investigation draws upon more than two years of reporting, thousands of documents and dozens of first-hand interviews. FRONTLINE spoke to family and friends of the victims, and witnesses, some of whom had never been interviewed; current and former Justice Department officials and FBI agents, state and local law enforcement; lawmakers, civil-rights leaders and investigative journalists, to explore the Department of Justice’s reopening of civil rights-era cold cases under the 2008 Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act.
In addition to an examination of the federal effort, the project features the first comprehensive, interactive list of all those whose cases were reopened by the Department of Justice. Today, the list stands at 151 names. Among the victims: voting rights advocates, veterans, Louisville’s first female prosecutor, business owners, mothers, fathers, and children.
The project consists of a web-based interactive experience, serialized podcast, a touring augmented-reality exhibit, documentary and companion education curriculum for high schools and universities.
A project like Un(re)solved would not be possible without the historic and contemporary contributions of universities, civil rights groups, and the press, particularly the Black press, who have ensured the ongoing public record of racist violence in the United States. To pay homage to these groups, the web interactive begins with a quote from journalist, activist and researcher Ida B. Wells, one of the first to document with precision the horrors of racial terror in America. “The way to right wrongs,” she wrote, “is to turn the light of truth upon them.”
At the outset of the project, FRONTLINE forged a relationship with Northeastern University’s Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project (CRRJ), bringing them on as an academic partner. Launched in 2007 by Distinguished Law Professor Margaret Burnham, CRRJ is a mission-driven program of interdisciplinary teaching, research and policy analysis on race, history, and criminal justice. Their work has expanded beyond the names on the Justice Department’s list, archiving documents in over 1,000 cases of racially motivated homicides.
With support from the CRRJ, FRONTLINE reporters gathered what could be known about the individuals on the list, conducting interviews with family, friends and witnesses, delving into newspaper archives and gathering documentation including headstone applications, draft cards and archival photographs.
At the heart of the project has been a drive to center the voices of the families of those on the list. FRONTLINE partnered with StoryCorps to record nearly two dozen oral histories with victims’ next of kin, which are featured both in the web-based interactive and traveling AR exhibit. These oral histories will also be archived in the National Library of Congress.
To lead the creative vision for the web experience and installation, FRONTLINE partnered with Ado Ato Pictures, a premier mixed reality studio founded by artist, filmmaker, and technologist Tamara Shogaolu.
Shogaolu rooted the visuals in the powerful symbolism of trees. In the United States, trees evoke the ideal of liberty, but also speak to an oppressive history of racially motivated violence. In Persian myth, trees are humanity’s ancestors, while in Toraja, Indonesia, they serve as sacred burial sites.
“I was really inspired by looking at the role of the tree as a symbol in American history” Shogaolu said. “It’s been looked at as a symbol of freedom, we look at it as a connector between generations, and also there’s the association of trees with racial terror.” When designing the creative vision for Un(re)solved Shogaolu wondered whether she might be able to reclaim the symbol of the tree. “As a person of color, we’re often terrified of being in isolated places in the woods. And I thought it was kind of crazy that there are natural environments that instinctually give great fear because of this connection with racial terror and I wanted to reclaim that — to turn these into beautiful spaces.”
Un(re)solved weaves imagery of trees, which also recall family ties, into patterns and textures from the American tradition of quilting. Among enslaved African Americans forbidden to read or write, quilts provided an important space to document family stories. Today, quilting remains a creative outlet rich with story and tradition for many American communities.
We invite you to enter this forest of quilted memories — a testimony to the lives of these individuals, and the multi-generational impact of their untimely, unjust loss.
(Credits to come)