Carolyn Goodman, EdD, was an organizer and an activist from early childhood. As a 7-year-old in Queens, N.Y., she convinced a local gardener to ask his customers--her father among them--for a raise, so that he could work fewer hours and spend more time with his children.

"Luckily my father wasn't too upset," recalls Goodman, now 89 years old.

For more than three decades, Goodman has also been a clinical psychologist. That career, she says, stemmed from the same impulse as her early activism--a desire to understand and to help individuals.

But Goodman's most public face is that of a mother. Her son Andrew was one of three young civil rights workers murdered in Mississippi during the Freedom Summer of 1964.

Early this year, a new arrest in the 40-year-old case brought a surge of attention to Goodman, who still lives in the sprawling, book-filled apartment on Manhattan's Upper West Side in which she raised her three children. With her strong voice and blond bob, she could be at least a decade younger than her age, and she's responded calmly to the renewed press interest.

In the many media interviews she's given in the past months, she's emphasized that she wants justice to be done, but she does not want revenge.

"I'm totally against capital punishment," she says. "Who's it going to help? But I do believe that the man who organized the murder of three civil rights workers should be incarcerated."

Indeed, justice has been a theme of Goodman's life these past 40 years. In addition to qualifying and working as a clinical psychologist after her son's death, she and her husband started a foundation in their son's memory to support the causes he believed in, and she's spoken all over the country about the civil rights era and her family's place in it.

A history of activism

Andrew Goodman grew up in an era, and a household, in which politics was a central topic of discussion, his mother remembers. Explaining the genesis of his activism in a 1989 interview with the Neshoba Democrat, a Mississippi newspaper, Goodman recalled gatherings at the family's apartment in the 1950s to support people who resisted Sen. Joseph McCarthy's hearings.

"In this house he heard a lot of open talk," Goodman told the paper. "He knew that his parents would go out and picket on the line for better working conditions for working people."

So when Andy, at age 20, said that he was going to travel to Mississippi to register southern black voters, his parents couldn't say no.

That trip, immortalized in the 1988 movie "Mississippi Burning," ended in tragedy. Less than a week after he arrived, Ku Klux Klan members in Philadelphia, Miss., murdered Andrew Goodman, along with fellow civil rights workers James Chaney and Michael Schwerner. After a three-year federal investigation, 18 men were tried for conspiracy. But the all-white jury convicted only seven of them, and none served more than six years in jail. Nor did any face murder charges, until now.

In January, Mississippi police arrested preacher Edgar Ray Killen, now 79, and charged him with organizing the murders. Killen was one of the 11 men acquitted of conspiracy in 1967, reportedly because one of the jurors said that he couldn't vote to convict a preacher.

Even in the immediate aftermath of their son's disappearance, the Goodmans continued to advocate for civil rights and to encourage other volunteers in Mississippi--and their example inspired others.

Gloria Levin, PhD, a community psychologist in Maryland, was a 22-year-old Freedom Summer volunteer in Mississippi in 1964. She recalls gathering around a television set with the other volunteers watching Carolyn Goodman being interviewed soon after the three men disappeared.

"I was so taken with her when I watched her on TV, being so supportive of what her son had done, despite everything," Levin recalls.

She credits Goodman with inspiring her career in community psychology, although she didn't even know that Goodman was a psychologist at the time.

"Always in the back of my mind was the idea that she helped start me on my life's path," Levin recalls.

Meanwhile, in 1966, Goodman and her husband Robert set up a foundation in their son's memory. The foundation supports projects that work to advance civil liberties and human rights, economic justice and youth activism. Goodman runs it now with the help of her two surviving sons. In one personally relevant project, they've teamed with the families of James Chaney and Michael Schwerner to sponsor four bus caravans--in 1989, 1994, 1999 and 2004--to commemorate 1964's Freedom Summer and emphasize the continuing need for voter registration and participation.

Right now, Goodman says, the foundation's main project is a full-length documentary about Freedom Summer and the murders.

But her activism isn't stuck in the 1960s. As recently as five years ago, she says, she was jailed--briefly--while protesting Amadou Diallo's shooting by four New York City police officers.

She also speaks to student groups about her family's experience--recently, for example, she spoke at Harvard University. She always gets a lot of questions, she says: "Young people don't know much about what happened a generation ago, and in fact neither do many adults. They're thirsty for that knowledge."

The psychology connection

Goodman came to psychology later in life. As an undergraduate at Cornell University in the 1930s, she studied home economics. She met her husband there, married and had three children--Andrew was the middle child. She returned to school at Columbia University in the 1950s, eventually earning a master's degree in psychology in 1959.

"I was always drawn to try to understand people," she explains.

Then Andrew was killed in 1964 and her husband died three years later. Faced with those losses, she did what she could to move on.

She decided to finish her doctorate in psychology at Columbia's Teachers College. After graduating, she found practical ways to integrate her activism and her profession by becoming involved in community psychology.

For example, she helped start a program called Parent and Child Education at the Bronx Psychiatric Center, for woman patients there who had young children. The program brought the children to the hospital so that they could spend time with their mothers, while trained counselors taught the mothers healthier ways to interact with the children.

"In some ways, I think social justice and psychology are one and the same," Goodman says. "What is social justice? It's more than an abstraction, it's about individual people. Everyone has equal value and should have equal opportunity."

Overall, Goodman says, her life and her work have been full and rewarding.

"I always tell people that I've been very lucky," Goodman says, "and they say, 'How can you say you've been lucky when you've suffered so many losses?' My answer is that my losses have made me strong because they are a legacy for young people, who can envision that risks are worth it if the goal is to create a peaceful and just world."

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