MARTIN LUTHER KING AND BARACK OBAMA: ANOTHER COSMIC ANNIVERSARY

Mlk_wave_from_podiumI was about to be a senior in high school that summer, with my family on vacation in Provincetown, MA, at the tip of Cape Cod.   All I really wanted to do was find Edna St. Vincent Millay’s summer hangout and the theater used by Eugene O’Neill  and the Provincetown Players.  Those were gone; instead, I tripped over a future that quickly ended my quest for the past.

Walking by a restaurant, we passed a TV sitting on the sidewalk, on a milk crate so everyone could watch.  On the air: the March on Washington and the speech by Dr. Martin Luther King.  I was transfixed.  Living in a little town outside Pittsburgh, I hadn’t really paid much attention.  Until that moment.  It was August 28, 1963, and it launched the next phase of my life.  As I watched, I knew that I belonged there – where there was purpose – in the middle of history.  It was a profound thing to listen to this man, to see the sea of people around him, watch the individual interviews, hear the music.  When people wonder how we became a generation of activists, I know that this was one of the moments that drove us forward, if we weren’t there already.

How beautiful then that EXACTLY 45 years later, Barack Obama will accept the nomination of his party to be the Democratic candidate for President of the United States.  I heard Rep. John Lewis, so badly beaten in the 1965 march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, tell an interviewer that he wasn’t sure he could make it through his own speech — that if anyone had told him that 45 years after that Selma march he’d watch an African-American man accept the presidential nomination, he would have told them they were crazy.  Obama adviser and friend Valerie Jarrett, describing what it would mean to her parents in an interview with our own Erin Kotckei Vest, struggled to contain her own tears.  This is important.

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CAROLYN GOODMAN, WITH GRATITUDE

 

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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