“There’s a battle outside and it is ragin”
The lyrics of Bob Dylan’s influential song of the era, “The times they are a changin”, capture the restless yet hopeful mood pervasive in America in the early 1960’s. Young people were joining forces with African Americans in the South who had been consistently denied their fundamental civil rights and who were faced with unspeakable violence when they tried to peacefully protest. At lunch counters, on buses and in schools throughout the South - the hostility and injustice of segregation was erupting into national attention through news coverage of peaceful resistance and ever more frequent protests.

In May of 1964 the enactment of the historic Civil Rights Act was being blocked by segregationist senators in Congress. In a school paper, Andrew Goodman wrote “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.” Within days of writing those words, Andy asked for his parents’ permission to join the Freedom Summer campaign to register African American voters in Mississippi. Although concerned about the danger he would face, his parents let him follow his passion for service to others.

Freedom Summer
On June 21, 1964, Andrew Goodman arrived in Neshoba County, Mississippi one of a small army of young people who had volunteered for Freedom Summer, a voter registration campaign organized by the Southern Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Within hours of arriving in Mississippi, Andy traveled with two other SNCC workers, Michael Schwerner and James Chaney, to investigate the burning of a rural church that had hosted organizing meetings for voter registration work – a typical example of white supremacist intimidation. That afternoon, after leaving the arson site, the three were arrested and held in the Philadelphia, Mississippi, jail until nightfall. After their release, as they drove toward the relative safety of Meridien, they were waylaid, taken to a remote area, and murdered by a band of Ku Klux Klansmen, assisted by local police.

Similar acts of violent intimidation and murder were not at all uncommon at that time, but the murders of Goodman, Chaney and Schwerner marked a change. The federal government was mobilized, all the way to President Lyndon Johnson, and national attention was focused on the southern racial situation in a way never seen before. The deaths of these three young men led directly to meaningful changes, as mainstream America was forced to acknowledge the realities of life in the South, and affirm civil rights as a universally held value for all Americans. Although their deaths make them nationally famous and among the best known civil rights martyrs, they were among hundreds - overwhelmingly African American - who had been killed during the civil rights struggle. But their murder, while idealistically fighting for social justice, woke up the sleeping conscience of a nation.

Eleven days after their murder, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed into law.
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