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 Photo Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily BeastJune 21 is the 54th anniversary of the 1964 murders of Andrew Goodman, James Cheney, and Michael Schwerner by a Ku Klux Klan execution squad led by the sheriff in Philadelphia, Mississippi. After the three men disappeared, the FBI and hundreds of Navy sailors hunted for six weeks to locate their corpses, which were discovered buried in an earthen dam.
I met Andy Goodman when we were 6 years old. From first to fourth grade, he and I attended Walden School—an experimental school in New York at 90th Street and Central Park West. At recess, we would play kickball, softball, and touch football in Central Park. One day, Andy tackled me against a granite rock. My lip split and I had stitches. We became friends. One day in nature class, the teacher held out a curling green snake. Andy held it for a while, talked to it, and then carefully gave it to me. I have always been afraid of snakes, but Andy calmed me. He loved Jackie Robinson. I loved Mickey Mantle. I met his mom, Caroline Goodman. We had little sense of politics then.
In the spring of 1962, I went on what was called "a Freedom Ride" to picket a segregated Woolworth's lunch counter in Chestertown, Maryland. Â Chestertown was the most segregated place, along with Cambridge, Maryland, on the edge of the North.
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