By David J. Glenn
The 1950s and early '60s often evoke images of drive-ins, high school proms, Elvis, post-war affluence.
Usually not included in such nostalgia, though, are white-only water fountains and bathrooms, poll taxes and tests, hoses and dogs, sham trials and lynchings.
That was the America that most black people, particularly in the South, knew in the '50s. It was the America that many people of all races wanted to change – and to a large extent, did.
In Freedom Summer 1964, activists traveled to the South to register black voters. Three of them – Queens College student Andrew Goodman of Forest Hills, James Chane, and Michael Schwerner – were murdered by Ku Klux Klansmen in Philadelphia, Miss. in Neshoba County in an infamous crime that inspired the popular book and movie, “Mississippi Burning.”
Andrew's parents, Carolyn and Robert, founded the Andrew Goodman Foundation in 1966 to offer continuing support for grassroots activism and the civil rights movement. Carolyn Goodman is now among the people honored in “The Long Walk to Freedom, 1900-1999,” on exhibit through May in the lobby of the Citigroup Building in Long Island City.
“We were always interested in justice,” Carolyn Goodman told Qguide. “Andrew knew of our concerns [for social change] That's why he became involved.”
She said that she and her husband expected Andrew might get into trouble in Mississippi and might wind up in jail- “We saw the [TV] images of the hoses and dogs,” she said – but “we never imagined he would be murdered.”
Goodman said she's pleased that current Neshoba County District Attorney Michael Moore has announced he will pursue state murder charges against the KKK members who killed her son and the other two activists – something the government of Mississippi did not do 36 years ago. “White people who killed black people or killed civil rights activists were not charged with murder in Mississippi then,” Goodman said. The KKK members were brought up on federal charges of violating the activists' civil rights.
“The Long Walk to Freedom” grew out of a project developed by Community Works, a non-profit organization that offers arts education in New York City's public schools. About 200 students from the Computer School, a Manhattan middle school with a diverse enrollment, studied the civil rights movement of the 1960s and interviewed 16 largely unsung heroes of the era, many of them not much older at the time than the kids are now.
Many of the youngsters are quoted in the exhibit talking about what they hope to do to aid social justice. “I want to be a lawyer,” says Yonas. “I would help everyone, not just rich people, and I would not judge them.” Says Samantha: “I would work as an after-school programmer, so that I could talk to kids about how they feel about the world.”
A guidebook to the exhibit offers some interactive lessons. One exercise asks each participant to pick out one person in the room, a stranger who is also viewing the exhibit, and without talking to the individual, make a series of 10 assumptions about the person, such as where he or she was born, or whether the person keeps a clean or cluttered room. Then the student is asked to interview the person, and find out how accurate the assumptions were. the idea, of course, is to show how far off initial assumptions and stereotypes about people can be.
“The exhibit seeks to show,” said Barbara Horowitz, executive director of Community Works, “that youth activism and grassroots of the '60s can help shape the current generation of young community leaders so that they, too, will make a difference.”
Reach Qguide Editor David Glenn by e-mail at glenn@timesledger.com, or call 229-0300, Ext. 139.
