Justice on the Walls by info-whynotbooks

Justice on the Walls A Narrative of the Robert and Carolyn Goodman Art Collection

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Carolyn Goodman and I had quite a bit in

still vividly recall taking part in a protest over a mere

Käthe Kollwitz, the personality of Philip Evergood,

common. We were both lifelong New Yorkers whose

half-acre of land. New York City parks commissioner

or the perseverance depicted by Robert Gwathmey—

first husbands, Bobby and Bill, were brothers and

Robert Moses was attempting to pave over a glen

the art spoke to their values and priorities, to their

civil engineers. Our families spent several summers

that neighborhood children had been using as an

humanity.

together in the Adirondacks, and we both sent our

unofficial playground. He wanted to convert it into a

When I consider the merits of artists, those

children to Walden School. In fact, one of my earliest

second parking lot for the Tavern on the Green. My

elements are present as well. Of course, I choose on

forays into the art world consisted of compiling a

friend and I voiced our dissent loud and clear and got

the basis of talent and originality. But also, each artist

book of prints of New York paintings to raise funds

The New York Times to cover the story. And in the

has to show their involvement with life, an indication

for Walden.

end, Moses built the parking lot elsewhere.

that their creations channel a bigger picture. A half-

But beyond family, we also shared a willingness

I learned, in part from Carolyn and Bobby, that no

century ago, when I first attended the international

to tread new territory as women in our chosen

issue is too trivial for compassion. And no battle goes

art show in West Germany, I had an epiphany. These

fields. In the 1960s, both Carolyn and I pursued

unfought where one’s children are concerned. That

young artists, whose parents perhaps had enabled

graduate degrees from Columbia University—me

is why I was so devastated for them when my nephew

atrocities a generation earlier, were forced by their

in art history (the only woman in my class), and

Andy was murdered at the hands of the Mississippi

personal histories to forge their own values. They

she in education. Late in the decade, after Bobby

KKK in the summer of 1964. All these decades later,

didn’t have the luxury of navel-gazing. Their art

died suddenly, Carolyn turned her grief into a new

I still cannot think about his funeral—including

reflected a necessary examination of their past and

path, becoming a clinical professor of psychiatry. At

hundreds of people standing outside the Ethical

future, their culture, themselves and their humanity.

about the same time, I got divorced, and I turned

Culture Society, singing “We Shall Overcome”—

I was fortunate to have acquired my particular

to art to make a living. Essentially, we worked to

without welling up in tears.

tastes in the 1960s and 1970s when it was all but

I almost quit Columbia at the time—because

impossible to ignore the world around you. Benjamin

We shared, too, progressive sensibilities that

of the civil rights movement. I thought perhaps I

Buchloh has described my gallery as having “a certain

reflected a commitment to social justice. My friend,

should try law school—do something useful. I wasn’t

subtle social horizon of responsibility.” Perhaps. But

art historian Benjamin Buchloh, once described me

sure art reflected this. But then I realized it certainly

I might argue that social justice can be as subjective

as having “a broad understanding of what a privileged

does, in its own way. A year later, I opened my first

as art. And all great art can touch the soul. As trite as

existence allows and requires one to do.” But that also

business, dealing in artists’ editions. I was on my way

that may sound, I do believe it to be true.

describes Bobby and Carolyn. They were unafraid to

to a career as a gallerist. Andy’s death had made me

merge courage with conviction, whether the issues

question everything. And I began to find answers.

rehabilitate our lives.

for which they agitated were international (like my parents, they fiercely supported the Loyalists during

So what does all of this have to do with art? Well, possibly everything.

So this book, this narrative of the lives of the Goodmans as told through their collected works of art, is nothing less than a soulful journey.

Marian Goodman

the Spanish Civil War), national (as unwavering

I spent many hours at the Goodmans’ 86th Street

Marian Goodman Gallery

voices for civil rights), or quite local (raising money for

apartment, particularly when Andy went missing,

New York City, New York

underpaid members of the New York Philharmonic).

where I was surrounded by the artwork on the walls.

October 6, 2019

I was inspired by their efforts, large and small.

Whatever drew Carolyn and Bobby to the works in

In fact, although it has been more than 60 years, I

their collection—whether it was the personal story of

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Art as Arc

The title of Carolyn Goodman’s memoirs, My Mantelpiece, is a reference to a work of art—in a manner of speaking. It comes from an anecdote about a fleeting moment that occurred in the early 1950s. Carolyn was sitting in her apartment eight floors above West 86th Street on Manhattan’s Upper West Side when her youngest son, David, bounded in. The second-grader was holding a piece of artwork that he had created. “Mom, come here!” David shouted. “Look at my mantelpiece!” He meant masterpiece, of course. “In the eyes of a sevenyear-old,” Carolyn recalled, “it was a creation of unmatched brilliance—Monet and Degas and O’Keeffe all rolled into one. In fact, that’s quite literally what it looked like.” And yet… it seemed an appropriate title for a memoir. The mantelpiece, after all, is where we place photos of loved ones or collectibles memorializing watershed moments; it is our past and future on display. A masterpiece is essentially the product of another’s estimation, a pronouncement of judgment. But a mantelpiece offers a self-portrait through personal statements of priorities— faces and places that we choose in order to tell our story. Might that also describe an art collection? Amid all the reasons why one might accumulate art— to celebrate the exquisite, support an artist, invest in a talent, preserve history, thrill at discovery—perhaps the purest motive is simply to communicate information about oneself, about one’s preferences and ideals. As much about identity as aesthetics, it is less a collection for public display than a cultivation of a museum of the self. It is as autobiographical as a memoir—but perhaps more mantelpiece than masterpiece. Over the decades, Carolyn and her husband, Bobby Goodman, collected many things: Friends and visitors to that Upper West Side apartment, a procession of blacklisted artists and fearless intellectuals. Causes, aggressively progressive, both before and after the good fight became a profoundly personal mission. Three sons of divergent interests and accomplishments, including one—their middle son, Andy—whose unbearably tragic end shocked a nation and galvanized a movement.

And art, too, a collection by no means separate from all of the above. The art on the walls of the Goodman apartment—from talents as diverse as Joseph Hirsch and Al Hirschfeld, Käthe Kollwitz and Ben Shahn, Philip Evergood and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec—didn’t just adorn a house; it revealed the soul of a home. This assemblage—oil paintings and lithographs, caricatures and pencil drawings, serigraphs and studies— was not meticulously curated. It was more a product of impulse over the years, the impulse to bolster a friend or impart a feeling, to preserve a heartbreaking but resonant memory, to make a point. But each work of art tells a tale—through the collectors’ connection to the struggles and sensibilities of the artist, or through the power and emotion of the imagery, or often through both. And the collection as a whole offers a narrative arc of a personal journey, as well. It tells the story of lifelong efforts to pursue social justice, to endure, to overcome. As Carolyn wrote in her memoirs, “My life has been a work of art—a wondrous, colorful, tragic, flawed, intimate, and epic work of art. This is my story.” s

A Voice of Astonishing Volume

“In nine decades of observing, a lifetime of analyzing and hypothesizing and extrapolating, I did not learn one damn thing about the meaning of life,” Carolyn Goodman once reflected. “Frankly, I never quite came to the conclusion that there is such a thing. But it was not the meaning of life that interested me anyway; it was the meaning of people.” So it was that for many years the Goodmans’ sprawling Manhattan apartment became a gathering place for fascinating people, a panoply of progressive icons—actors, athletes, attorneys, and artists whose work hung on the walls. During the Roaring Twenties, Gertrude Stein’s Paris salon had been a Left Bank nucleus for expatriates. A generation later, during the fear of McCarthyism and the tumult of the civil rights movement, the Goodmans’ Upper West Side version was a haven for often-persecuted left-wing friends: Blacklisted writers Dalton Trumbo and Ring Lardner, Jr.; Martin Popper, the attorney who defended the Hollywood Ten, and his wife Kathryn, an actress who famously asked “What’s Rosebud?” in Citizen Kane; force-of-nature actor Zero Mostel and novelist Howard Fast; musical activist-icons Harry Belafonte and Mary Travers; the great Jackie Robinson and his wife Rachel. These disparate personalities were drawn together by a communal sense of resistance. One of the most outsized personalities—and the man whose art most adorned the Goodmans’ apartment—was Philip Evergood. “Lots and lots of people are afraid to go near any strong statements,” he once lamented. But not him. Evergood had, according to his biographer John I.H. Bauer, “a voice of astonishing volume” and spoke “pungently, oratorically, colloquially, dramatically— moving in unpredictable shifts from humor to pathos, from fantasy to hard common sense.” Robert Coates, art critic for The New Yorker, proclaimed him “as mad as Poe” but “also as compelling.” Philip Howard Francis Dixon Blashki was born in an artist’s studio—literally, that belonging to his father, Meyer Evergood Blashki (the adopted surname Evergood was a translation of Immergut, his grandmother’s Polish-Jewish maiden name). Much of his early life was characterized by

decisions that seemed contrary to expectations. He was the son of an Impressionist painter, but impressed as a young piano prodigy. He was born in New York, but educated at Eton and Cambridge. He was trained as a scholar, but emerged as an artist. He was raised in a secular household, but his first drawings were Biblical scenes, which he considered “a starting point for the imagination.” He later recalled, “I wasn’t interested in struggles at that period. I hadn’t been exposed to any suffering.” But then Evergood moved back to his native New York, and he watched the Depression’s personal catastrophes play out from a window of the 14th Street loft that he shared with his wife Julia. “That’s what brought me to life,” he said. “When I wandered down Christopher Street to the river and saw a hundred men in a shantytown built of old mattresses and bits of orange crates in the middle of winter with snow two feet on the ground and a little bit of a fire they were huddled around—that’s what woke me up more than anything.” His drawings from that night—which he considered a milestone in his life—later became paintings for the WPA and launched Evergood into an artistic point of view that has been described as everything from expressionism and social realism to storytelling and surrealism. With an eye for truth but a style that suggested an element of fantasy, he often depicted the gritty lives of those who were denied the American Dream. Particularly during the Depression, Evergood conveyed the shame of bigotry, the struggle for dignity, the reality of hunger, the brutality of war. He painted a pregnant factory worker, a dead soldier wearing a crown of thorns, a long line of refugee children walking through a shell-pocked field, a black man hanging from a tree above dancing Klan members. He called his works Mine Disaster, The Pink Dismissal Slip, Fascist Company, Turmoil, American Tragedy, The Forgotten Man. Evergood became deeply and personally involved in the struggles that he portrayed and the progressive causes that sought to alleviate those struggles. His activities were certainly inspired by his observations. “His allegiance to causes which have won his heart has kept him in the frying

pan or the fire for much of his life,” Bauer wrote. “I doubt if there is another contemporary artist whose life illuminates his art more clearly.” In the mid-1930s, while Evergood was participating in a sit-down strike instituted by more than 200 artists, Bobby and Carolyn Goodman—still students at Cornell University—were organizing farmers’ cooperatives in rural New York and picketing in support of unionization. While Evergood was serving as president of the Artists Union and managing supervisor of the New York WPA easel project (fighting to keep laid off artists on the payroll), the Goodmans were actively supporting the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee. Carolyn eventually became Women’s Chair of the organization. While Evergood was being beaten and jailed several times for his protest efforts, the Goodmans were holding a “farewell party” to raise bail money for Dr. Edward Barsky, who was being sent to prison for refusing to give his JAFRC records to the House UnAmerican Activities Committee. This was a common scene at the Upper West Side salon—socialization with a strong undercurrent of social justice. As the lives of the Evergoods and the Goodmans intersected at these affairs, theirs was a friendship bolstered by a shared worldview. When Bobby Goodman was still an undergraduate at Cornell, he won an oratorical award for a speech titled “A Plea for Active Pacifism.” He spoke these words: “Sometimes, even if he must do it alone and his conduct seems mad, a man must set an example and draw out men’s souls from the mire of the swamp, and spur them on by some act of righteous indignation that this great idea may not die.” More than three decades later, during an oral history interview for the Smithsonian Archives of American Art, Evergood seemed to echo the notion: “Whether the background was proletarian or not, there is a point sometimes in people’s lives when something comes along to stir them up.” s

SELF-PORTRAIT TIPPING HAT Philip Evergood

WHAT PRICE GLORY Philip Evergood

LAKE FISHERWOMAN Philip Evergood

CHILDREN Philip Evergood

Theatrical Artists

Theatre caricaturist Sam Norkin liked to tell a story about arriving at a rehearsal in 1960 for the Broadway production of Eugène Ionesco’s Rhinoceros, an absurdist political drama about the human need to conform and the dangers of fascist thinking. Norkin planned to sketch the show’s stars, Zero Mostel and Eli Wallach. Mostel greeted him warmly, then took him aside, winked, and whispered, “Here’s twenty dollars. Keep Eli out of the drawing.” For that surrealist play, Norkin actually wound up sketching Mostel larger than life, which was appropriate to both the performance (a wild transformation from person to pachyderm) and the performer. The caricature artist and the quite-caricaturable actor had crossed paths many times before, occasionally at the home of Bobby and Carolyn Goodman. Norkin lived in an apartment a few floors above the Goodmans on West 86th Street. Mostel lived across the street at The Belnord Apartments. They were a couple of raconteurs, but Norkin was more of a storyteller, while Mostel often made himself the story. The dynamic was illustrative of the two men— both “theatrical artists,” only in very different ways. The Brooklyn-born Norkin was an observer. He illuminated the players and productions (theater, opera, ballet, film) that dominated New York throughout the last half of the 20th century, providing weekly illustrations for The New York Herald Tribune and the New York Daily News for more than four decades. Inspired by the Cubists, he found what he described as “design and geometry in facial anatomy.” Using a collection of swirling and angled pen-and-ink lines in more than 4,000 elegant drawings, he conveyed the essence of performers and plays—from John Gielgud to Jack Black, from Hello, Dolly to The Goodbye Girl. Norkin once defined the art of caricature as a “meaningful exaggeration or distillation” of a subject or personality by “taking liberties with proportion.” Mostel must have been an unusually easy subject. Also Brooklyn-born, Mostel was drawn to being observed—comically and colorfully, whether he was on stage, at a crowded restaurant, or even testifying before a congressional committee. With his unforgettable face, “eight-ball eyes,” and prodigious energy, the three-time

Tony Award-winner embodied some of stage and screen’s most iconic roles (Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof, Pseudolus in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Max Bialystock in The Producers). “I never saw a theater that was large enough to hold or contain him,” Neil Simon once recalled. “Zero didn’t embrace an audience. He gave you a bear hug, squeezed unmercifully, then licked your face as he put you back down in your seat.” The drawing that Norkin signed for the Goodmans depicts Mostel’s Obie Award-winning role as Leopold Bloom in Ulysses in Nighttown, the 1958 Off-Broadway adaptation of James Joyce’s epic classic (Mostel later reprised the role on Broadway). In 1961, Rhinoceros earned Mostel the first of his three Tony Awards, marking a triumphant return of sorts from a dark period in his life. Only a year earlier, he had been struck by a bus near his apartment, suffering a severe leg injury that nearly required amputation. It was rather a physical metaphor for his career, which had been profoundly hobbled by a force familiar to the denizens of the Goodmans’ 86th Street salon—the House Un-American Activities Committee. By 1951, Mostel’s career had been thriving—he appeared in five films that year. He also had a reputation as a fearless progressive who contributed often to leftwing causes—from the Southern Conference for Human Welfare to the American Committee for Spanish Freedom. His nightclub act—at social clubs of labor unions and at the Café Society, New York’s first integrated club— combined comedy and social commentary, lampooning red-baiting and featuring a pompous senator named Polltax T. Pellagra. David Goodman recalled hearing a story from Mostel about encountering “white” and “colored” drinking fountains in the South. Mostel made a show of disgustedly spitting out the water from the former, savoring the wondrous taste from the latter… then dramatically switching the signs. So it came as little surprise when Mostel found himself embroiled in HUAC’s investigation into “communist infiltration” of Hollywood. In 1952, he was effectively blacklisted, and Twentieth Century Fox cancelled his contract. Three years later, he was subpoenaed to appear

before HUAC. He refused to divulge names, invoked the Fifth Amendment, and verbally jousted with the congressmen in an attempt to make them look foolish. He also mocked “18th Century Fox,” insisted that the name “Zero” represented his “financial situation in the community” thanks to HUAC’s efforts to sully his name, and later thanked HUAC “for letting me back on television… no pay, of course.” Most important—and most serious—Mostel defended his right to the privacy of his political beliefs. “I believe in the antiquated idea that a man works in his profession according to his ability rather than his political beliefs,” he said. “When I entertain, my political beliefs are not spouted. As a matter of fact, I am casual about my political beliefs, which I wouldn’t tell anybody unless you are my friend and you are in my house.” His friends, including the regular attendees of the Goodman gatherings, admired his courage. But his career suffered, and he resorted to occasional nightclub gigs for meager fees. So he supplemented his income by turning to the artistic endeavor that was actually his first love—painting. In his younger days, Mostel (then known as Sammy) had majored in art at City College of New York, briefly worked toward a master’s degree in the subject at NYU, then taught art for the Works Projects Administration’s Federal Arts Project. He also gave gallery talks at New York’s art museums, where his humor began to dominate—impersonations, jokes, sound effects. As a result, his career veered toward entertainment, but his friends always remembered Zero Mostel, the painter. Following Mostel’s sudden death in 1977 at the age of 62, blacklisted screenwriter Walter Bernstein opined that “he felt the true core of himself not on the stage, but when he was painting.” And Eli Wallach, his old Rhinoceros costar, recalled that Mostel’s nightly transformation into a proto-prehistoric beast “was done with a painter’s eye.” He added, “To those who tried to confine the artist, to mold his thoughts, to make him a fearful puppet, Zero thumbed his horn in derision. Bursting through the stage door, he brought down the curtain with a snort, a gurgle, a roar of comedic defiance.” s

ZERO MOSTEL Sam Norkin

character study

Iconic caricaturist Al Hirschfeld preferred to call himself a “characterist.” His drawings, former Whitney Museum Director Lloyd Goodrich explained, grasped “essential truths of character.” Hirschfeld once claimed, “The capturing of a likeness is of no more importance to me than the humming of a tune! The subject matter of ‘likeness’ serves merely as stimulant or catalyst—a sort of springboard for an unpredictable dive into the unknown. Fortunately, I have never been at a loss for subject matter.” In more than eight decades of celebrating subjects, most often via black ink line drawings and primarily for The New York Times, Hirschfeld chronicled nearly every major entertainment figure of the 20th century— from Martha Graham to Whoopi Goldberg, from Billie Holiday to Bruce Springsteen. His name became a verb. If you were “Hirschfelded,” you had arrived. And his signature gag—hiding his daughter’s name somewhere in most drawings—became a Nina-finding obsession to some. But while he was famous for harmless fun and what emerged as a lifelong archive of entertainment, this didn’t mean that Hirschfeld was apolitical. He supplied covers to the Leftist magazine New Masses, for instance. That may be why one of his frequent subjects was Joe Papp, whether Hirschfeld portrayed him as an eightarmed producer (simultaneously answering a phone, working a cash register, advertising, smoking a cigar), overseeing a Shakespeare in the Park production, or chewing on a pipe while considering his next theatertransforming act. Papp was described as a modern-day Robin Hood, in the sense that he essentially brought New York City theater (long largely reserved for the moneyed) to the masses—first on his portable stage, then at the Public Theater and the Central Park Shakespeare Delacorte Theatre. He embraced the unconventional—both playwrights and audiences. And performers, too, as he shifted norms by casting people of color to play the leads in his Shakespeare productions. As a producer, he wasn’t afraid to take on topics like the response to the

AIDS crisis (The Normal Heart) and black feminism (For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow is Enuf). At one point, Papp owned five OffBroadway theaters. His plays like Hair and A Chorus Line became singular Broadway sensations. Papp also produced a play for peace. In 1989, amid tensions between the black and Jewish communities in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights neighborhood, he and Rabbi Marc Schneier co-founded the Foundation for Ethnic Understanding. FFEU works to restore the historic alliance between the two communities that played such a pivotal role in the civil rights movement—the kind of coalition that brought together two Jewish New Yorkers, Andrew Goodman and Mickey Schwerner, and one native Mississippian, James Chaney, in the summer of 1964. Indeed, Papp was a good friend of Carolyn and Bobby Goodman, who were early benefactors and promoters of Shakespeare in the Park. So he certainly understood how fitting it was to gift them with a particular Al Hirschfeld caricature—of exiled Irish dramatist Sean O’Casey. It was a love of Shakespeare that buoyed O’Casey during his impoverished childhood in Dublin, a life dominated by sorrow (the death of his father and two siblings) and the separateness that came from being a Protestant rebel in Catholic Dublin. O’Casey was Carolyn Goodman’s favorite playwright, and her bookshelves brimmed with his internationally famous dramas and autobiographical books, which one critic described as “a great and lovely tide of rhetoric.” Hirschfeld drew O’Casey in his trademark embroidered skullcap, steel-rimmed glasses, and turtleneck sweater—the “Ninas” found in the strands of his hair and in the wool of his sweater. O’Casey chews on a pipe, too, as if mulling over the realities that he explored on the stage in both satire and tragicomedy— the misery caused by imperialist wars, the impact of revolutionary politics on the poor, suffering, self-deception, survival. The Star Turns Red (1940) was an allegory in which the Star of Bethlehem turns crimson, reflecting how the Roman Catholic hierarchy in Ireland openly supported

fascism. Indeed, O’Casey was an unabashed fan of Russia’s brand of Communism, describing a Communist as “anyone who tries to help humanity”—including, he said, FDR and all who voted for him. He clung to the belief until the end of his days; even in his 80s he called for young writers not to be “afraid of life’s full-throated shouting, afraid of its venom, suspicious of its gentleness, its valor, its pain and rowdiness.” But while his dramas echoed the Social Realism movement in the art world, O’Casey insisted that he found “fake realisms” on the stage distasteful. “Let us have art in the theater,” he wrote. “There is a deeper life than the life we see and hear with the open ear and the open eye, and this is the life important and the life everlasting. So to hell with so-called realism, for it leads nowhere.” So here, in the Goodman collection, was a work of art with stories behind it: The artist was a New York City theater icon who famously strove to immortalize his child. The subject was a controversial playwright who celebrated freedom and the struggles of the working class. The giver of the piece was another New York City theater icon—an iconoclastic defender of the disenfranchised. The receivers of the gift were a combination of all that, a couple who sometimes struggled, as O’Casey did, to maintain idealism amid tragedies that weighed heavily in favor of disenchantment. Sure, it was a (deceptively) simple line drawing. But it had layers. s

SEAN O’CASEY Al Hirschfeld

Shaping a Better world

Visitors to the Goodmans’ Upper West Side apartment often wondered why so many books lined the walls, many of them duplicate copies. The truth is, not all of those books were theirs. They were left-leaning reading material of friends who were frightened during the Red Scare and figured it was better not to have socialist “evidence” lying around their house. So the Goodmans housed a library filled with anxiety and a great deal of pain. To some extent, Bobby and Carolyn played the role of supporters and protectors, but you can’t protect against a chilling effect—like that experienced by their good friends, Bob and Rosalie Gwathmey. By the mid-1950s, Robert Gwathmey was already a paragon of Social Realism in art, and Rosalie was a photographer of renown. Although they lived in the New York area for more than a quarter-century, they would spend summers in their native South—he was an eighth-generation Virginian; she was from North Carolina. They would paint and photograph simple scenes, often of African American farmers and laborers. Many of Rosalie’s photos—of southern townscapes and sharecroppers—became the basis of her husband’s paintings. Using geometric shapes, two-dimensional representations, often startling colors—a style described as “abstraction in the service of social realism”—he was among the first white American artists to depict black Americans with dignity and empathy. Was he a social artist? Of course, he explained: “I’m a social being, and I don’t see how you can be an artist and be separate.” During the nadir of McCarthyism, when their leftwing activism received increased scrutiny (they were under FBI surveillance for 27 years), the Gwathmeys spent a year of voluntary exile in France. Far from their native inspirations, Bob attempted to paint from memory, and Rosalie tried to continue to capture the human condition. But a photo of a Frenchman buying a baguette… it wasn’t the same. When they returned home in 1955, Bob destroyed everything he had painted during their exile. Rosalie went further. She discarded her negatives, dismantled her dark room, sold her cameras, and donated most of her prints to the New York Public Library, keeping only a handful of

them in one box. Every once in a while, she would peek in and recall the subjects, and Bob would occasionally use them for reference for his paintings. But Rosalie became a textile designer. She stopped being a photographer— abruptly and forever. Aside from their socio-political commonalities, the Goodmans and Gwathmeys shared a history of loss. Eight months before Bob Gwathmey was born, his father, a railroad engineer, had been killed instantly when his locomotive exploded. Two weeks before the Goodmans’ wedding, Carolyn’s father had taken his own life. Bob Gwathmey’s sister, Mary Louise, had been killed in a tragic horseback riding accident at age 21. Four decades later, 20-year-old Andrew Goodman was preparing to go to Mississippi. Gwathmey was a ubiquitous and comforting presence in the Goodman household, spinning yarns in his southern twang from a living room chair as if he were sitting in a rocking chair outside a country hardware store. Andy Goodman was listening. Paul Robeson once said of Gwathmey: “He has shared in the shaping of a better world.” Andy sensed the need for this at a young age. At age 15, he traveled to Washington, D.C., for a Youth March for Integrated Schools. At 17, he and a friend journeyed to West Virginia by bus to examine firsthand the poverty of Appalachia. At 19, he was a summer counselor at a camp for underprivileged children. Then, in the spring of 1964, he decided to volunteer for the Mississippi Summer Project, an effort to flood the state with hundreds of northern college students who would teach disenfranchised African Americans about their constitutional rights and engage in a massive voter registration drive. It was a dangerous proposition. In 1964, the Ku Klux Klan had essentially been revived in Mississippi as a response to the expected “invasion” of civil rights workers. In fact, in a single night in late April of that year, the FBI reported the simultaneous burning of crosses in 61 locations across the state. Klan membership was estimated at about 10,000 men. So Freedom Summer, as it became known, was an aggressive movement up against an intransigent and newly motivated population of segregationists. There were some who believed violence was inevitable.

Being only 20, Andy was required to ask parental permission. He stood in the doorway of Carolyn’s bedroom one afternoon and said, “Mom, I’d like to go to Mississippi.” Not only that—Neshoba County, a part of eastern Mississippi notoriously unwelcome to “outside agitators.” But, like Gwathmey’s pencil drawings in the Goodman collection (Worker and Woman Sowing), Andy saw it in black and white terms. The state with the largest percentage of black residents had the lowest percentage of black voters. He wanted to share in shaping a change, and his mother recognized that he was a spiritual reflection of herself. “My son wanted to be a beacon of light in the heart of darkness. How could I deny him?” she recalled. “I wanted him to go, and I didn’t want him to go. Here was my son, whom I wanted to protect and save from anything hurtful, and yet it wouldn’t have felt right saying, Well, let the other guys go, but don’t you go. It would have destroyed our values. It would have devastated our son.” As Andy was preparing to leave, having packed his duffel bag, Carolyn secretly threw in some bandages, gauze, and iodine. She figured he might get injured, perhaps even thrown in jail. Never in her wildest nightmares did she think that would be the last time she would see him. She wrote in her memoirs, “I allowed him to go there, and I was both guilt-ridden and proud, and I devoted the rest of my life to making sure he did not die in vain.” s

WORKER Robert Gwathmey

WOMAN SOWING Robert Gwathmey

ART IS A WEAPON

“MISSING. CALL FBI.” These horrifying words screamed from atop a flyer featuring a trio of young faces—vibrant young men who had vanished. “The FBI is seeking information regarding the disappearance at Philadelphia, Mississippi, of three individuals on June 21, 1964…” While training as a Mississippi Summer Project volunteer in Ohio, Andy Goodman had been recruited by two men who operated a Congress of Racial Equality community center in Meridian, Mississippi. One was a brave 21-year-old African American from Mississippi named James Chaney. The other was 24-year-old Mickey Schwerner who—as a Jewish, goateed, New Yorker—was particularly despised by the Ku Klux Klan in east Mississippi. On June 21, the trio examined what was left of a church that been burned to the ground— the first of more than 20 that were firebombed in Mississippi that year. It was the first day of Freedom Summer and Andy’s second day in Mississippi. But by that night, they hadn’t returned. The following day, a phone call to the Neshoba County jail revealed that they had been detained the previous afternoon for speeding—and actually arrested as suspects in the church arson, even though they had been in Ohio at the time. They hadn’t been allowed to make a phone call, and they hadn’t been seen since. For 44 agonizing days—while the FBI devoted 153 men to the case and before everyone’s worst fears were realized—that flyer of the “missing civil rights workers” haunted the friends and family who joined Bobby and Carolyn Goodman in waiting and hoping. Among those friends were Samuel Kamen and Edith Segal. Segal, the daughter of Russian Jewish immigrants, was born and raised on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Her father made cigars; her mother made wigs for observant Jewish women. But Edith wanted to make art, pursuing a career as a dancer. Her mother dismissed her as a “bummarike”—Yiddish for bum—but Segal was mentored by the likes of Blanche Talmud and Martha Graham and eventually used dance as a means toward an end. When she choreographed an Ashkenazic family

coming alive from a photograph in a picture frame, for instance, the aim was to preserve Jewish culture and prevent anti-Semitism. Dance was an opportunity for political activism— movement as part of the Movement. Some influential producers refused to book Segal due to her far-left leanings, but she remained undeterred. “Art is a weapon,” she declared, after returning from a visit to the Soviet Union in the early 1930s. She became known as not just a dancer, but a leftist dancer, designing performances about race relations—with titles like Scottsboro, Southern Holiday, Black and White. The latter was one of the first interracial dance performances in the United States. Segal wasn’t coy about her commitment. She formed a dance company called the Red Dancers, helped found the Workers Dance League, and staged a Lenin Memorial Pageant at Madison Square Garden that featured some four-dozen dancers in a hammer-and-sickle formation. She taught for decades at Jewish-socialist Camp Kinderland, often employing some campers in political dances. It was no surprise, then, when she was called to testify before the New York state legislature during its 1955 investigation into alleged communist infiltration of summer camps. After retiring as a professional dancer, Segal turned from the stage to the stanza, making words move in harmony. Celebrated by the likes of Langston Hughes and once described as “the poetess laureate of the Left,” she wrote three books of poetry for children, as well as books in verse for adults, including Give Us Your Hand! Poems and Songs for Ethel and Julius Rosenberg in the Death House at Sing Sing. By then, she had a partner in visualizing social justice—her third (and final) husband Sam Kamen. Also the son of a Russian Jewish immigrant, Kamen was a painter and lithographer. Best known as a watercolor artist—both abstract and figural works in oils and acrylics—he also illustrated several of his wife’s books. In 1963, not long before Andy Goodman decided to volunteer in Mississippi, the husband and wife jointly produced a poetry collection for children, Come With Me, which included the poem “Dreams.”

Dreams we have when we’re asleep Are dreams we never really keep, Dreams we keep are dreams we make When we’re very wide awake. Segal continued her mission throughout her life, later marching against the Vietnam War, performing with Pete Seeger, and writing poems in protest of nuclear proliferation. As one interviewer commented, “Clearly, solid left-wing causes act on her the way vitamins do on others.” But she remained haunted by the memory of what happened to her friends’ son in Mississippi. In 1974, she and her husband collaborated on another poetry collection. Its title: Poems and Songs for Dreamers Who Dare, which well-describes Andy Goodman, poet and actor, principled activist. In fact, the book was dedicated to the murdered civil rights workers who (as Maya Angelou wrote in her foreword to My Mantelpiece) represent thousands more “who had the courage to go to the lion’s den and try to scrub the lion’s teeth.” A decade after the bodies of the three men were found buried in an earthen dam, Segal and Kamen presented to their friend Carolyn (and her second husband, Joe Eisner) a signed print of the illustration that accompanied Segal’s poem, “Tell It On and On!” As an artist, Kamen had occasionally noted the difference between seeing something and choosing how to depict it. This was a near-exact reproduction of the faces that peered from the missing persons poster in the summer of 1964. The accompanying poem, penned by a woman who kept progressively persisting, concluded with this exhortation:

TELL IT ON AND ON! Samuel Kamen and Edith Segal

Sing for our martyred brothers Slain for freedom, Sing their names and tell their story, Tell it on and on! Tell it on and on! s

What Might Have Been

Carolyn Goodman claimed to have had one hallucination in her life—when she saw her son’s casket. Years earlier, during long car trips when Andy was a little boy, he had revealed his penchant for play-acting by grabbing whatever clothes were strewn about the car and trying them on—an oversized sweater, a colorful scarf, a goofy hat. It was this young version of Andy that she saw that day in 1964, a vision of him sitting cross-legged atop his casket and smiling theatrically. “I don’t know why, at that moment in my grieving, I remembered Andy as a five-year-old,” she recalled in her memoirs. “I know I wanted him to be alive, to be a young, carefree innocent again. I wanted to remember the loveliness of Andy Goodman.” As did artist Michael Allen Hampshire. Hampshire met Andy on the stage. The former was the set designer and the latter a novice actor in an Off-Broadway production of The Chief Thing, written by Nikolai Evreinov. An all-but-forgotten turn-of-thecentury Russian playwright and director who was often described as “the Russian Oscar Wilde,” Evreinov— like Andy Goodman—was both the son of an engineer and a natural musician. He was a remarkably versatile artist—painter, novelist, composer, as well as a scholar of theater philosophy who believed that “life borrows from the stage.” In other words, nature is brimming with elements of theater, whether a mouse feigns death to escape a cat, a walking stick blends into a tree branch, a child imagines something from nothing, or an adult tries to appear less imperfect. “We are all essentially theatrical beings,” he said. Evreinov wrote The Chief Thing just after the Russian Revolution. His most successful production, it was later translated into 27 languages and had a short run on Broadway. Subtitled “a comedy for some, a drama for others,” the play has been described as a commentary on the fine line between reality and illusion. It is set primarily at a boarding house, where a man posing as a fortune teller injects himself into the lives of young actors, all of whom are enduring a crisis of some sort. Andy, attending Queens College at the time, played a cynical and suicidal student.

The production at the Thirteenth Street Playhouse featured two-dozen actors in a basement space consisting of 42 seats. Evreinov might have appreciated the scene, as he preferred hungry performers aiming for collective artistry over jaded professionals seeking personal accolades. The critics were impressed. “Those interested in either life or theatre should go see it,” The Village Voice observed. And one critic for Show Business declared that “Andy Goodman should be the answer to many a casting man’s search for new faces.” This was in the summer and fall of 1962. Andy was 18. Hampshire was nearly a decade older, a native of West Yorkshire, England. During the Second World War, he was raised primarily by an aunt. His father manned a naval ship in the North Atlantic; his mother volunteered as an ambulance driver. An actor in his early years, Hampshire later studied drawing, painting, and photography at Leeds College of Art. After his family emigrated to the U.S. in 1957, he picked up a few acting roles, even once alongside a young Barbra Streisand. In 1962, he combined his love of theater and his gift for art as the Thirteenth Street set designer. Following Andy Goodman’s death, Hampshire felt compelled to immortalize his memory. He called his portraits Andy A.M., suggesting a young man in the morning of his life. Of course, there was a double meaning: “Ante mortem” means “before death.” When Carolyn Goodman first saw the full-size version, she was stunned by how dramatically it captured her son. “Without thinking, I just reached out my hand to touch it. It seemed so alive,” she told an interviewer not long after the paintings were completed. “Michael caught Andy in all his seriousness, in all his intensity, in all his determination.” Hampshire went on to a successful career as a mainstream artist and illustrator; his work can be found everywhere from commemorative plates and music boxes to children’s adventure novels. But most profoundly, he found a niche recording historical architecture and archaeology. His murals and paintings were installed in venues reverent of vanished Native

American cultures, such as Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site in southern Illinois and the Grande Pueblo Museum in Phoenix. In more than three decades as an artist for Time-Life Books, the National Geographic Society, and the National Park Service, he celebrated vibrant lives long gone and glorious civilizations too often forgotten—a Hohokam village in central Arizona’s Salt River Valley, a cliff dwelling in northern Arizona’s Walnut Canyon, a Cahokia chief greeting the sunrise. They were historical interpretations—an artist’s renderings of what might have been. At the time of his death, at the age of 80 in 2013, Hampshire lived in the Phoenix suburb of Paradise Valley. His home featured a collection of statues of St. Michael, the archangel—mentioned in the Old Testament, the New Testament, and the Quran—who came to be viewed first as a healer, then a protector, then a leader against the forces of evil. Perhaps Hampshire sensed many of the same qualities in Freedom Summer volunteers. By immortalizing on canvas a young man full of life and love and aspirations, Hampshire’s portraits of Andy Goodman also served as a lament about extinguished potential. Notice the extensive, unfilled space above Andy in one painting—Hampshire’s suggestion that Andy was to “grow into the fullness of the day”—as well as the unseen object of Andy’s attentions in the other. This, too, was an artist’s rendering of what might have been. s

andy a.m. Michael Allen Hampshire

Andy (left) in The Chief Thing

“Art is life,” Ben Shahn said. “I cannot separate

The Truly Great

the two.” For years, Shahn’s lithograph of Andrew Goodman— a personal gift from the painter to the mourning parents— hung on a wall of Andy’s old bedroom in the Upper West Side apartment. The room long served as Carolyn Goodman’s office, surely a source of comfort as she worked to turn his martyrdom into a mission. Carolyn always insisted that her son didn’t give his life; it was taken from him. In 1965, late in his career as a pioneer of Social Realism, Shahn honored that life—and those of Andy’s Freedom Summer colleagues, as well as icons Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King Jr.—in a series of works to benefit the Human Relations Council of Greater New Haven, Connecticut. This was only a year after the deaths of the three civil rights workers, as the investigation led to the arrest of 19 men, including Neshoba County’s swaggering sheriff and his deputy. Shahn’s portraits of the victims became iconic images themselves, rendered with an elegant simplicity—spare, black lines conveying a certain youthfulness amid the long struggle for justice and a sense of peacefulness amid the tensions of the time. Of course, the work also represented the quintessential Shahn—the notion that art can do more than please the eye; it can stir the soul. His was art to encourage activism, even as each decade brought new artistic genres and new political and social challenges. “The biography of a painting is the biography of the man who paints it,” Shahn insisted, and he was a painter much the way Woody Guthrie was a singer and Upton Sinclair a writer. Born in 1898 into an Orthodox Jewish family in Lithuania, Shahn watched as his father was exiled to Siberia for his anti-czarist activities. Pogroms were his introduction to prejudice; protest was his early learned reaction, even if meant merely yelling “Down with the Czar!” to anyone in uniform before running to safety. His family reunited in 1906 after immigrating to working-class Brooklyn, where Shahn was forced to drop out of high school and earned income as a lithographer’s apprentice. Raised amid religious and political persecution, struggling

with ethnic identity, surrounded by immigrants and refugees clawing for living wages, Shahn turned to art as a means of speaking to a universal audience. “Every painter tells a story,” he said. “The condition of the human being is the story that I’ll tell.” Shahn rose to prominence by chronicling the swift tide of xenophobia through 23 paintings about the controversial trial and executions of Italian immigrants Sacco and Vanzetti. He painted what he described as “the indomitable spirit of man to rise from an incredibly impossible situation,” as in The Red Staircase, which depicted an elderly man using crutches to ascend a long flight of stairs. He expressed spiritual values in secular terms, as in The Meaning of Social Security, a massive mural lining both walls of a corridor at the Wilber J. Cohen Federal Building in Washington, D.C. The artist’s decisions in the creation of his Human Relations Portfolio harkened back to his experiences in the 1930s and 1940s. During the Depression, Shahn was hired by the Farm Security Administration to photographically record the devastation of rural America in an effort to garner support for FDR’s New Deal. He began to turn many of those photographs into paintings, just as he did with the FBI’s missing persons photographs of Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman. The marriage of text and images drew on his efforts as a graphic artist. He bucked established conventions and utilized his lithography background on behalf of mass-produced works—propagandist posters that paralleled his progressive beliefs. For labor unions and political campaigns, regarding the horrors of Nazi fascism and the human consequences of hydrogen bomb testing, he merged words and graphics to powerful effect. Shahn was a believer in the power of poetry, once lamenting, “You can put out a shingle as a doctor, as a certified public accountant, as an engineer. But you can’t put out a shingle saying ‘poet.’” Indeed, his Human Relations Portfolio included a lithograph featuring a black background and a white dove, wings outstretched, surrounded by ten names—victims of the era’s racial terrorism in the Deep South. Beneath the names, he handwrote the final stanza of a 1928 Stephen Spender

poem—“The Truly Great.” When Shahn felt compelled to send a signed lithograph of Andrew Goodman to Andy’s grieving parents, he again inscribed that stanza in its entirety, including the final words: “… they travelled a short while toward the sun and left the vivid air signed with their honour.” Carolyn wrote Shahn a letter of gratitude, not only for the work (and gift) of art, but for the poetic affirmation. She and Bobby had been drawn to the very same poem as they prepared their son’s epitaph, believing that it reflected, in Carolyn’s words, “the life of this gentle and strong boy, who with his companions died for all humanity.” In fact, after changing only a couple of pronouns, the Goodmans had Spender’s final lines engraved on Andy’s tombstone. s

HUMAN RIGHTS PORTFOLIO Ben Shahn

A Sea of Song

Moments before he was fatally shot in Memphis in 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. shouted joyously from the balcony of the Lorraine Motel when he spotted saxophonist Ben Branch, who was scheduled to perform at a rally that evening. “I want you to play ‘Precious Lord’ for me,” he said. “Play it real pretty.” The motel is now the National Civil Rights Museum, where Branch’s saxophone is on permanent display, a reminder—tragically ironic, perhaps—that jazz was the soundtrack of the civil rights movement. At times passionate and sorrowful, reflective and powerful, integrated and improvised, jazz was a blend of musical expressions created by Americans who arrived both by choice and by force. “Once the whites who played it and the listeners who loved it began to balk at the limitations imposed by segregation, jazz became a futuristic social force in which one was finally judged purely on the basis of one’s individual ability,” historian Stanley Crouch wrote in the New York Daily News. “Jazz predicted the civil rights movement more than any other art in America.” Sometimes jazz was a player behind the scenes—as when black and white musicians, forbidden to play together publicly in the early 20th century, jammed together in after-hours sessions. Occasionally, it was part of an open act of defiance, as when concert promoter Norman Granz insisted on non-segregated seating. And at times, it was just a shrug and a song, as when preeminent bandleader and clarinetist Benny Goodman simply hired an African American musician to be part of his ensemble in 1935. As the civil rights movement soldiered on, jazz increasingly became an instrument of reaction and rebellion. In 1929, Louis Armstrong sang “My only sin… is in my skin.” A decade later, Billie Holiday added “Strange Fruit” to her set list, a song that represents various art forms merging toward social justice: A white man photographed a gruesome lynching in Indiana. A shocked Russian Jewish immigrant wrote a poem about the cruelty of the scene (“Southern trees bear strange fruit…”). An African American icon turned it into a civil rights anthem.

In fact, the process somewhat echoes an observation in Carolyn Goodman’s memoirs: “We interpret our experiences, knowing that truth is perception, and in doing so we add layers to ourselves.” Increasingly, musicians used jazz as a means of layering the struggle for social justice—anger and dismay and purpose put to music. Charles Mingus displayed his outrage at the 1957 Little Rock Nine episode by composing “Fables of Faubus.” John Coltrane wrote “Alabama” as a reaction to the Birmingham church bombing in 1963. The tune echoed Reverend King’s eulogy of the four young victims, moving from a mournful melody dominated by Coltrane’s plaintiff saxophone to a percussive crescendo representing the determination to continue the struggle. The following year, Nina Simone stood in front of an audience at Manhattan’s Carnegie Hall and declared, “The name of this tune is ‘Mississippi Goddam’… and I mean every word of it.” She sang, “You don’t have to live next to me/Just give me my equality,” and radio stations in the South reacted by banning the song and returning 45s cracked in half. But exactly three months later, the disappearance of Andrew Goodman and his colleagues made the song’s title even more profound and prescient. So there was a saxophonist in the Goodman art collection, a drawing that long adorned a wall above Andy Goodman’s bed. It was a gift from Ben Shahn, who often said that he could tell a story better with pictures than he could with words. Then he added, “I would like to have told a story with music.” But this gift of a signed lithograph wasn’t only a visual expression of the sound of civil rights struggles; it was also a recognition of music’s essential role in the Goodman household—and the fusion of activist values and artistic passions. At the 86th Street apartment, where Leonard Bernstein occasionally could be found tickling the ivories of the family’s piano, the Goodmans often arranged for members of the New York Philharmonic to perform chamber music. They invited dozens of guests, requested a cover charge, and then donated the money to the underpaid musicians. In 1964, Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie and dozens of other jazz icons performed at the Jackie Robinson

Jazz Concert, a fundraiser (staged in the baseball icon’s Connecticut backyard) benefitting Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference. The Goodmans were among hundreds of invited guests. “But for us,” Carolyn said late in her life, “music was more than another cultural outlet or social cause. It was sustenance. It was family.” Like Benny Goodman (no relation), Andy Goodman played the clarinet. And he would sometimes sit up until dawn listening to his jazz records. His younger brother, David, was an excellent oboe player. Their older brother, Jonny, was accepted into the Juilliard Graduate School of Music, training for a time as a choral and orchestral conductor. Bobby Goodman’s mother was an accomplished pianist, and Bobby played the violin, though not terribly well. What he lacked in talent, he made up for in unabashed passion. His poetry was rife with musical references, as when he described their summer home in the Adirondacks as “a bar of contentment in a sea of song,” or when he dreamed up “a commanding melody that climbs the hills, like a flooding river on a mighty run.” And his friends who sat behind him at the New York Philharmonic claimed he was their barometer of judgment regarding the symphony’s performance. When they saw Bobby clapping wildly in front of them with a rapturous expression on his face, they knew that they had just listened to something magnificent. Carolyn believed music was about “the experience, the emotion, the way a melody could unite or uplift or galvanize or encapsulate a weighty memory.” So, while planning her own memorial service in typical fashion years later, she made song an integral part. A lovely contralto singer performed “Amazing Grace.” A longtime friend strummed and sang Peter, Paul and Mary’s “Sweet Survivor.” The great Harry Belafonte offered his version of Pete Seeger’s Mississippi lament, “Those Three are on My Mind.” Finally, the service came to a close with a jazz trumpeter—and a gospel choir belting out “When the Saints Go Marching In” and then heading for the doors, leaving the notes and notions of that sanguine song to echo in the rafters: “We are trav’ling in the footsteps of those who’ve gone before/And we’ll all be reunited on a new and sunlit shore…” s

SAXOPHONE Ben Shahn

Hands of Freedom

Late in her life, the great Maya Angelou reflected, “The murders of Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, and Mickey Schwerner rocked me to the core of my very being. I was used to white men killing black men. But I was not used to white men killing white men because of black men.” Sadly, there was a difference—in the reaction to the tragedy and in the way it galvanized the movement. After the disappearance of the three men, many students who were training up north in Ohio received strong pressure from their parents to drop out of the Mississippi Summer Project. But by the end of the first week, only ten of the 300 volunteers had left. That’s courage. Of course, the black residents of Mississippi had no such options; either they had to remain in silent oppression or stand up and risk their lives on a daily basis. In fact, during their search for the missing civil rights workers in the rivers and swamps of eastern Mississippi, the FBI discovered other bodies—local African Americans who had gone missing over the years, including one neveridentified 14-year-old boy who was wearing a Congress of Racial Equality T-shirt. Rita Schwerner, Mickey’s wife, noted that if James Chaney had been alone at the time of the disappearance, the case would have gone unnoticed. It was that kind of place and time, suffering from profound inequality between the resources and attention given to victims of color. Because two of the victims in Philadelphia were white, because they were targeted and ambushed, the nation was stunned by this new level of brazenness. After a couple of Klansmen became FBI informants, a dozen-and-a-half men were arrested for the crime, but none were tried for murder because murder was not a federal offense unless it was committed on federal property. A state prosecution would have been a mockery at the time as no serious investigation had been undertaken. So instead, the U.S. Justice Department reached back to a Reconstructionera statute and accused the defendants of depriving the victims of their civil rights. The trial finally took place more than three years after the bodies were found. By then, revoltingly, many

of the defendants had become local folk heroes. When the verdicts were returned, only seven of the men were found guilty, including Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price. Only two received the maximum sentence. None served more than six years in prison. Sheriff Lawrence Rainey, the swaggering, tobacco-chewing paragon of unlimited power and lawlessness in Neshoba County, was acquitted— although he later found himself stained by his reputation, even in Mississippi. He wound up working as a security guard at a mall. One of the men involved in the plot, the man who owned the bulldozer that buried the bodies, was from a tiny hamlet right next door to Philadelphia—a town called Hope. And, remarkably, there was some reason for hopefulness—in the compassion and renewed conviction in the wake of the tragedy. Andy Goodman and his colleagues have been memorialized in many ways—a Chaney-GoodmanSchwerner Clock Tower at Queens College, a memorial in front of the rebuilt Mount Zion Methodist Church in Mississippi, songs by the likes of Pete Seeger and Simon & Garfunkel, even a 2,176-foot Mount Goodman in the Adirondacks. And among the hundreds of letters that the Goodmans received during the summer of 1964 was a note from a girl named Robin Goodman (no relation). It read: “I am ten years old, and I have a cat. Would you mind very much if I called him Andy?” It was a black-and-white cat, and the girl’s instincts for symbolism are reflected in the work by Cliff Joseph that was so prominent and profound in the Goodman art collection. Joseph was the co-founder in 1969 of the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition in New York, a group involved in creating socially conscious artworks, as well as a pioneer in art therapy at Pratt Institute and at prisons across the United States. He believed that he and other African American artists could not distance themselves from the political process: “In our struggle for transcendence, we cannot separate our professional efforts from the totality of our day-to-day lives. Resolving contradiction is the essence of the creative process—in artistic production and in our commitments to social change. Our creative gifts obligate us to a large responsibility in making history.”

Joseph’s art, in the words of Martin Luther King, Jr., “expressed the meaning and sacrifice of our struggle.” It was unflinching in its depictions—about lingering sorrow (The Children of Birmingham, 1964), the crime of inaction (The Bystanders, 1966), blind patriotism (My Country Right or Wrong, 1968). “My art is a confrontation,” he said. In Hands of Freedom, owned by the Goodmans, Joseph focused not on the familiar faces of the three Mississippi victims, but rather three sets of hands representing the coalition between Jewish and black activists. The hands were completing a process—grabbing chains, breaking chains, unchained. Following Freedom Summer, the drawing was featured on a poster and flyer produced by the Council of Federated Organizations in Mississippi and even printed at the top of COFO letterhead. The image was accompanied by text. Eight words—“…now with your hand, pull the lever down”—shouted from the top. Beneath that exhortation to vote, above each set of hands, were three levers and three names—“JUSTICE” and “Michael Schwerner,” “EQUALITY” and “Andrew Goodman,” and “FREEDOM” and “James Chaney.” No words were necessary in the original that adorned a wall of the Goodman home. There was power enough in the imagery of three men reaching upward as if from the grave, breaking long-oppressive shackles. The message was clear: Instead of impeding progress, their martyrdom would inspire it. s

Hands of Freedom Cliff Joseph

observer and participant

Signs announcing “nuclear fallout shelter”— remnants of a volatile decade—were once commonplace throughout the country. The sign, prominent in the background of Raphael Soyer’s oil on canvas Study for “Village East Street Scene,” was affixed to the Goodmans’ building on West 86th Street. Given the latter’s frequent supportive gatherings—both during the McCarthy era and after Andy Goodman’s tragic end—it may have seemed like more of a metaphor. Shelter. At the turn of the century, a similar role had been played by the Soyer household in the southern Russian town of Borisoglebsk. Abraham Soyer was a scholar, a teacher, and often a host to young, Jewish intellectuals. By 1912, these meetings aroused the suspicion of czarist authorities, who refused to renew the family’s residence permit. The Soyers—including 12-year-old twins Raphael and Moses and their younger brother Isaac, all of whom later earned renown as artists—escaped to the U. S. The family settled in the Bronx, and Raphael eventually made his way to the Lower East Side. For Soyer, described as “a Damon Runyon with canvas,” the city became his lifelong inspiration. But instead of towering skyscrapers, he painted tired shop girls; instead of Broadway, it was bus stations. He revealed the human condition—not through overt social commentary, but rather with sympathetic depictions of ordinary people engaged in everyday tasks. In that sense, he echoed a sentiment once expressed by engineer/poet Bobby Goodman: “You can reach the stars better by setting rivets sometimes than by lapsing into ecstasies over the moon.” Soyer’s portraits featured the isolated and dispossessed: a homeless man hunched over a subway grate during the Depression, using a rod and chewing gum to fish for dropped coins; party-goers staring blankly amid a crowded scene; or his long-haired poet pals wandering the streets of the East Village during the 1960s. These were, according to The New York Times, “men and women of quiet self-absorption.” Soyer was constantly searching for identity, a sort of quiet self-absorption of his own. He produced scores of self-portraits, and his paintings often included an

unmistakable, slightly-built figure peering at the viewer from the background or edges of a scene. There he is, just below the SHELTER sign, almost an apparition. “I am a witness,” he once stated, “and I look a little confused because I am confused.” When he placed himself on the canvas, he seemed more observer than participant. Beyond the canvas, however, he didn’t just paint realism; he advocated for it. Soyer was unyielding in his defense of representational art, co-founding Reality magazine in the 1950s and joining the John Reed Club, which produced collective social protest murals and called for artists—regardless of subject or style—to align themselves with the poor and disenfranchised and fight for social justice. In Soyer’s Village East Street Scene (which included a bearded Allen Ginsburg among the pedestrians), the artist aimed to “convey a feeling of energy and life in an atmosphere of deprivation and drabness.” The study in the Goodman collection—an early iteration among several studies—was very much an experiment in composition. In fact, only one figure—the woman in profile—would eventually be featured in the final version. Of course, an artist’s study is, by definition, painting as preparation. It is art as investigation, and thus can offer insight into a process of discovery. In 1965, at the same time but some 80 blocks northwest of Soyer’s East Village studies, his friends Bobby and Carolyn Goodman were undergoing a similar process. They were attempting to discover how best to transition from mourning the loss of their son to securing his legacy. It is no accident that one of the seminal moments of the civil rights movement—the Voting Rights Act— happened the year following Freedom Summer, inspired in no small part by the fate of three young men. But the Goodmans yearned to perpetuate Andy’s legacy in a personal way, to carry on their son’s goals and dreams. So they launched the Andrew Goodman Foundation, devoted (for more than five decades now) to projects that advance human rights, voting rights, civil liberties, economic justice, and youth activism. They had found a way to be more participants than observers.

And then Bobby died, succumbing to a brain hemorrhage suddenly in 1969. He was only 54. After losing her son and husband in a five-year span, Carolyn fell into a deep depression. She later realized that she had often defined herself by the men in her life. But now… “My strength,” she told a friend, “just died.” Here, too, there are shades of Soyer. In the early 1940s, when America’s male population was being called to military service, he produced fewer city scenes, often focusing instead on lone women in public places. His portraits conveyed a palpable sense of absence—of separation from loved ones. Even the nudes that he painted throughout his career—including the pair in the Goodman collection—seemed to emphasize the emotional state of the model. Soyer was revealing a sort of naked humanity, but also a kind of private perseverance. In 1969, Carolyn Goodman came to a critical realization. “I always felt I couldn’t live my life as if it all but stopped on that fateful day in 1964 when Andy went missing—because if I did, my son’s death wouldn’t have any lasting significance,” she wrote in her memoirs. “Likewise, if I let the loss of my beloved Bobby reduce my sense of self, then I would lose significance, too. Fortunately, once again I had underestimated my will to survive.” s

UNTITLED nudeS Raphael Soyer

study for “village east street scene” Raphael Soyer

The Opposite of Beaten

One of Käthe Kollwitz’s best-known works, Peasant Woman in a Blue Shawl, is a chalk and brush portrait of a middle-aged survivor. She is a member of the working class—Kollwitz’s version, which celebrated strength and endurance rather than victimhood. The image’s darkly expressive quality (similar to that in Kollwitz’s other work in the Goodman collection—a 1920 lithograph, Pensive Woman) was beautifully summarized by art critic Joanne Laurier: “The woman’s gaze is intimate and singular, yet its intensity extends beyond the immediate. Her worries, concerns, and in the far distance perhaps, her hopes, speak to the general human situation. She has been battered by society, but is the opposite of beaten. One senses that for every blow struck against her, the future reckoning will be deliberate and thorough.” The recurring themes of Kollwitz’s work (poverty and war, death and bereavement, woman as mother and protector) certainly resonated with Carolyn Goodman, as did Kollwitz’s mantra—“I am in the world to change the world.” But even as a child, Carolyn was repelled by the expectations of a traditional girl’s role, so she also was drawn to Kollwitz’s biography. When visitors noticed the portraits on her walls or the collection of the artist’s letters and diary entries on her bookshelf, she would point out that Kollwitz was the first woman elected to the Prussian Academy of Arts. She was both painter and pioneer. Born Käthe Schmidt in East Prussia in 1867, she was greatly influenced by a father who joined the German Social Democratic Party. He encouraged her artistic talents, enrolling her in an art school for women in Berlin. At 17, she became engaged to a medical student, Karl Kollwitz, who later practiced medicine in a working-class section of Berlin, which further inspired his wife to, as she described it, “voice the sufferings of people.” Kollwitz later turned to lithography, woodcuts, and sculptures, but she initially preferred graphic arts as a medium and a reflection of her principles—accessible art as part of a larger narrative. Her first print series,

A Weavers’ Rebellion, depicting a failed revolt in 1844, aroused the ire of Kaiser Wilhelm II, who vetoed a jury-awarded prize for Kollwitz. “Orders and symbols of honor,” he claimed, “belong to the chest of deserved men.” So Kollwitz simply broke new ground with her second series, Peasants’ War, and its sympathetic depiction of a female victim of sexual violence. She made the representation of laboring class conditions her life’s work—at first, at least, simply because she found it to be a beautiful slice of humanity. “I felt the proletariat had guts,” she stated. “It was not until much later… when I got to know the women who would come to my husband for help, and incidentally also to me, that I was powerfully moved by the fate of the proletariat and everything connected with its way of life.” Although they were a half-century and thousands of miles removed, the parallels between Kollwitz and Carolyn Goodman are many. Both lost a brother at a young age. Both had a second son who, because he was underage, had to ask permission to undertake a dangerous volunteer mission. Both lost that son— Peter Kollwitz was 18 years old when he perished in the trenches of Flanders during the First World War. “Strength is what I need,” Kollwitz wrote in her diaries at the time. “Strength is: to take life as it is and, unbroken by life—without complaining and overmuch weeping— to do one’s work powerfully.” Kollwitz turned her grief into anti-war themes and myriad expressions of a mother mourning a child. “Is it a breach of faith with you, Peter,” she wrote, “if I can only see madness in the war?” When Hitler took power in Germany, Kollwitz’s works were stripped from museums, and she was threatened with deportation to a concentration camp. Kollwitz died just 16 days before the end of World War II, not long after a grandson, also named Peter, died in battle. Carolyn Goodman, also reeling from the loss of a son, opted for a more clinical approach toward stopping the pain and deprivation of one generation from carrying over to the next. In fact, the relationship between

mother and child became the fulcrum of her next stage of life. In 1968, just before Bobby Goodman’s sudden death, she had received her doctorate in education from Columbia University Teacher’s College. She found a practical way to integrate her passion and a profession by becoming involved in community psychology, explaining, “In some ways, I believe social justice and psychology are one and the same. After all, both are more than abstract concepts; they are about individual people.” At the Bronx Psychiatric Center, she inaugurated the Parent and Child Education (PACE) program, which was designed for emotionally disturbed mothers with high risk preschool children. The program brought the children to the hospital so that they could spend time with their mothers, while trained counselors taught healthier means of interaction. “I never approached the women in the PACE program as patients. They were mothers. That’s what we called them,” Carolyn recalled. “We wanted to foster a sense of intimacy and trust.” But trust often must be earned. One highly intelligent woman in the program, Regina Solano, had been abused and neglected as a child, and she had begun to show the same pattern in her behavior toward her three daughters. She had no use for Carolyn, whom she perceived as an advantaged woman on a charitable whim. How could she have any concept of what it means to suffer? Then one day, Solano noticed a memorial book on one of Carolyn’s bookshelves. “Andrew Goodman,” she said. “Was he a relative of yours?” Carolyn nodded. “He was my son.” And the floodgates opened. They hugged and cried and bonded, and Regina became a PACE program success story. Years later, when a local newscast reported that Carolyn had been arrested during a protest, Regina called to express her rather motherly concern. And later still, amid all the luminaries who spoke at Carolyn’s memorial service in 2007, perhaps the most touching moment came when Regina overcame a lifelong fear of public speaking and expressed her gratitude, describing a one-time stranger as her strength and savior. s

PENSIVE WOMAN Käthe Kollwitz

PEASANT WOMAN IN A BLUE SHAWL Käthe Kollwitz

Montmartre and mississippi

During all the years in which Mississippi had played such a large part in her life, Carolyn Goodman had never traveled to the place where her son had spent his final days. But in 1989, she decided to recognize the silver anniversary of Freedom Summer by forming a coalition of the families of the victims. Along with James Chaney’s younger brother, Ben, she led a Freedom Caravan into Mississippi, educating a new generation about old injustices. They showed civil rights films, held panel discussions, visited schools and libraries, and rode a bus along the same route tragically traversed by the three young men a quarter-century earlier. “It is nearly impossible to verbalize the emotion, but I was there with them,” she later recalled. “It was a cathartic experience, and perhaps a long overdue one.” Of course, as William Faulkner wrote about his native state, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Among the residents of Philadelphia, Mississippi, some of them even passing as respected citizens, were many of the men who had been arrested for the murders in 1964. Carolyn had traveled to Mississippi to confront her demons. Would that include the killers themselves? Here, it may be instructive to travel to a very different time and place. Exactly 30 years earlier, in the summer of 1959, Carolyn and 12-year-old David Goodman had visited Paris together. As they roamed the hills of Montmartre, Carolyn became captivated by the world so famously and frequently chronicled by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec— the cabaret singers and clowns, provocative dancers and prostitutes of Montmartre and the Moulin Rouge. In his short career—he died at age 36 from complications due to alcoholism and syphilis—Toulouse-Lautrec emerged as a Post-Impressionist icon and art nouveau illustrator. Carolyn purchased a limited-edition print (part of his 1898 “English Series”) of one of the artist’s favorite performers and subjects, Yvette Guilbert. Tall, gaunt, often wearing her trademark black, elbow-length gloves, Guilbert offered raunchy songs in a comic deadpan delivery that made her the most famous cabaret star in Paris in the 1890s. David recalls that his mother appreciated how the artist portrayed the subject—not as a gaudy or bawdy

denizen of Paris’s so-called urban underclass, and not as a symbol for moralizing or a heroine for romanticizing, but rather simply as a woman fending for herself. Of course, Toulouse-Lautrec’s personal struggles also fascinated Carolyn. Suffering from a crippling congenital condition that prevented his legs from growing as the rest of his body did (probably the result of inbreeding—his parents were first cousins; his grandmothers were sisters), the 4-foot-8 artist was ridiculed for his physical appearance. He walked with difficulty using a cane—which he reportedly hollowed out and kept filled with liquor in what became a pattern of self-destructive behavior. As a result, though he was born into an aristocratic family, he found comfort instead on the margins of society—amid Montmartre’s brothels and dance halls—and portrayed his subjects with a certain sympathy. These were his friends and (sometimes paid) companions who—like the artist— were trying to survive in a world that often deemed them unsavory. Amid the ugliness of perceived low station and stature, he found beauty and high art. Three decades later, when Carolyn found herself in Mississippi, she opted to echo that notion, finding beacons of light in a place that had long felt to her like the heart of darkness. “I wanted to find the people who wished to fight evil, not the people who are perpetuating it,” she wrote in My Mantelpiece. “I had learned a great deal about myself in confronting my hatred of those men—hatred so intense that it was beyond intellectual; it was almost physical— and about the need to maintain one’s faith in humanity, despite being victimized by such inhumanity. I knew those men were there and that there were others like them. But my mission was to reach out to the wonderful people of Mississippi, who are there in great numbers, too.” And she did. People like Stanley Dearman, who spent 34 years as the editor of Neshoba County’s newspaper and emerged as a courageous and progressive voice of reason and a good friend of the Goodman family. People like Jerry Mitchell, an investigative reporter in Jackson, Mississippi, who has tirelessly worked to put several notorious Klansmen behind bars. And people like Dick Molpus, the Mississippi Secretary of State and a native of the town

where Andy and his colleagues were killed, who rose in front of a large gathering and unhesitatingly apologized on behalf of the state for the events of the 1960s. “I couldn’t believe my ears. The moment was so profound for me, so therapeutic,” Carolyn recalled. “Afterward, I walked across the stage, and the two of us just held each other.” Carolyn later insisted that he be included among the speakers at her memorial service. When the 1989 Freedom Caravan pulled out of Philadelphia, planning to wind its way to New York City, Carolyn feared a failed homecoming. Would people really want to immerse themselves in the agonies of the past in an effort to ward off the hazards of the future? She worried that, when the caravan finally arrived at its terminus at New York’s Cathedral of St. John the Divine, the church would be filled only with echoes. But the caravan added a bus here, a car there, a van, a motorcycle, a convoy of supporters. When it finally arrived at the cathedral, there was a beautiful sight—a line of people around the block, hoping to get in. “I took it as a sign and a calling,” said Carolyn. “People want to know. They want to know.” s

Yvette Guilbert Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

Quiet Courage

It is certainly no surprise that, late in the lives of both Carolyn Goodman and Rosa Parks, the former added an image of the latter to her art collection. In 2004, nearly a half century after Parks made her stand by staying seated on a Montgomery bus, the city of Lynwood, California (some two thousand miles away) was preparing to name its transit station after her. Artist Jameel Rasheed was commissioned to capture her essence, and he produced a serigraph showing the “first lady of civil rights” peering out a bus window as if envisioning the future. He called it Quiet Courage. The aftermath of Parks’s courage has been exhaustively chronicled. The Montgomery Bus Boycott. The rise of Martin Luther King, Jr. The countless freeways and boulevards and bus stations and schools—even an asteroid—named after her. The Presidential Medal of Freedom. The first African American woman to lie in honor in the rotunda of the U.S. Capitol. Her selection, by Time magazine, as one of the 20 most influential and iconic figures of the 20th century. But lesser known than her legacy is the true genesis of her resistance. Decades earlier, as an elementary school student in Pine Level, Alabama, she would walk to her school while white students took buses to theirs. Every day, the bus would pass her by. It was, she later recalled, “among the first ways I realized that there was a black world and a white world.” Even on December 1, 1955, when she refused a bus driver’s order to relinquish her seat in the “colored section” to a white passenger after the whites-only section was filled—and was subsequently arrested for disorderly conduct and violating a local ordinance—her decision wasn’t primarily motivated by circumstances in Alabama. It was also about Mississippi. A few months earlier, 14-year-old Emmett Till had been “accused” of flirting with a white woman in a store deep in the Delta. Three days later, his body was found in the Tallahatchie River, a cotton-gin fan tied to his neck. In late November, four days before Parks would make the protest that turned her into an international icon, she attended a meeting in which it was revealed that Till’s

two murderers had been acquitted of the crime. Like so many others, she was devastated by the travesty of justice, though perhaps not surprised. So while the general narrative often has described Parks as staying seated that day simply because she was tired, it goes far deeper than that. “I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day. I was not old, although some people have an image of me as being old then. I was forty-two,” she wrote in her autobiography. “No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.” Or, as Dr. King wrote about her in his 1958 book Stride Toward Freedom, “Eventually the cup of endurance runs over.” Parks hadn’t planned on being arrested that day. She wasn’t even the first person arrested for not giving up a seat on a Montgomery bus. But she became the catalyst for a cause. She had spent much of her life as one of many who were agitating for social justice, and then an unexpected event had thrust her into being a very public face in the struggle. Carolyn Goodman well understood that. Rosa Parks’s Congressional Gold Medal had called her the “Mother of the Modern Day Civil Rights Movement.” In 2004, while Rasheed was creating Quiet Courage, Carolyn returned to Mississippi—in her role as a mother. Back in 1964, the supposed “mastermind” of the ambush of the civil rights workers was a part-time preacher named Edgar Ray Killen. He was one of the men arrested in the federal indictment, but he was acquitted because, remarkably, one juror admitted that she just couldn’t convict a man of God. But nearly four decades later, following a relentless push by various heroic and determined people, the State of Mississippi finally charged him with murder. So Carolyn, then almost 90 years old, traveled south to testify at the trial—to a courthouse in that very same Philadelphia, Mississippi. Mickey Schwerner’s former wife was there, along with James Chaney’s mother, brother, and daughter (who had been ten days old when he died). On the witness stand, after being asked to identify a picture of Andy, Carolyn read a postcard he had sent upon his arrival in Mississippi. It had reached New York after he had gone missing.

By the time she read the postcard’s closing words—“All my love, Andy”—there was barely a dry eye in the courtroom. All except for her son’s murderer, who sat emotionless nearby. But Carolyn maintained her composure. Quiet courage. On June 21, 2005, exactly 41 years after he orchestrated the killings, 80-year-old Edgar Ray Killen was convicted of three counts of manslaughter and ordered to serve consecutive 20-year sentences. Carolyn later remarked that her dominant emotion was relief—“not only because I had long envisioned locking up this monster, but also because I had long hoped for the sense of closure that it might give to so many people who had been victims of the Klan.” Indeed, courtroom observers that day included strangers from all over the country who were hoping for a general sense of justice for family members who had been slain by the KKK. “That’s really all I wanted,” said Carolyn. “Justice. Not vengeance.” Perhaps most profound was the simple juxtaposition between what the judge said in 2005 and what another judge had said in the first trial. In 1967, following the weak sentencing of only a handful of the killers, the racist judge had made this inexcusable and inaccurate statement: “They killed one n-----, one Jew and one white man. I gave them all what I thought they deserved.” Thirty-eight years later, Judge Marcus Gordon’s post-sentencing statement included this observation: “I have taken into consideration that there are three lives involved in this case, and the three lives should absolutely be respected.” s

Quiet Courage Jameel Rasheed

Heretic

At the cusp of the 21st century, at the age of 83, Carolyn Goodman was arrested. She had joined a dozen other women of a certain age to protest the death of Amadou Diallo, the unarmed Guinean immigrant gunned down by New York City police officers in a hail of bullets. After standing in front of police headquarters and refusing to budge, the women were taken into custody and placed in plastic handcuffs so loose that they probably could have freed themselves at any time. “Given the median age of our group,” Carolyn later recalled, “it would have been the slowest escape in the history of jailbreaks.” It was about then that one of David Goodman’s colleagues ran breathlessly into his office and told him that he had just seen David’s mother on television— being carted off to jail. David just shrugged and said, “Well, that happens from time to time.” Carolyn figured if her son could risk his life amid the unfamiliar country roads of Mississippi, she surely could stand up for her beliefs on the urban streets of her hometown, whether she was demonstrating in support of civil rights and equal rights in the 1960s and 1970s or against apartheid and police brutality in the 1980s and 1990s. No less an expert than Congressman John Lewis put it this way: “Carolyn Goodman got in the way. She got in trouble. It was good trouble. It was necessary trouble. And she inspired many of us to continue to get in trouble.” This may be why Joseph Hirsch’s Heretic, completed in 1965, was placed so prominently for so long in the Goodman’s 86th Street apartment. In fact, following Carolyn’s death in 2007, longtime NPR correspondent Margot Adler remarked that the painting, dramatic in its composition, was “the first thing that would hit you” upon entering the Goodman home—“in fact, it would almost stop you in your tracks.” She added, “It radiated a sense of danger, violence, and anxiety. Whenever I saw that picture, I thought of Carolyn Goodman the mother, torn apart by the murder of her son. But the actual Carolyn Goodman never showed that fear and anxiety in public. She appeared at events and causes,

always radiating purpose, good humor, and a belief in justice.” Carolyn certainly saw a bit of herself in the painting— not just regarding its subject’s devotion to a cause, but also the title (heretic: freethinker, renegade, a person holding an opinion at odds with what is generally accepted). Not to mention the blond hair and the pearls. And that may be just what Hirsch intended. “I have the impression—and it may be an illusion—that I don’t say anything which is complete, that I start a sentence and you finish it,” the artist told an interviewer in 1970. To continue the metaphor, the collected works of Hirsch’s illustrious career formed an epic novel—a half-century of social commentary—whether he was painting wounded soldiers being removed from the battlefield or homeless men seated around a table at a soup kitchen. Often, he used an intimate scene to suggest a subject’s emotional enormity, which art critic Frank Getlein described as “the making of monumentality out of the momentary.” The Lynch Family shows a young African American widow holding her baby; The Banquet portrays two men, black and white, side by side at a lunch counter; Deposition depicts a soldier holding the lifeless body of a comrade, like a modern pieta. Hirsch explained it simply: “In my painting, I wish to castigate the things I hate and paint monuments to what I feel is noble.” Or even simpler: “I make cudgels.” Like his good friend Bob Gwathmey, Hirsch found himself an expatriate. In 1949, he was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to study and work in Paris for a year. He stayed for six years, while he was denounced stateside as a communist sympathizer. Public pressure was even put on the Dallas Museum of Art to remove his award-winning Nine Men from an exhibition. Instead, the museum moved it into a separate room and asked patrons to judge for themselves—which circles back to Hirsch’s observation about point of view: “People bring so much to pictures. And I’m very dependent on what people bring.” Indeed, among all his works, he chose Heretic to articulate his perspective about perspective. After

mentioning to the interviewer that the painting was now owned by the mother of a martyred Freedom Summer volunteer, he pointed out that there are no policemen in the image, no police wagon, no handcuffs, no gas masks. Even the expressions on the faces are neutral. Only the fluting on the column in the painting, he said, suggests government or the law. “The associative value of objects, the small details, is something that I’m very aware of,” Hirsch explained. Interestingly, Hirsch painted another image a few years later that serves as a comparison. In Tryptich, a woman, her body limp in passive resistance, is being carried away with those same Doric columns in the background. But it is a different woman. And the men wear Orwellian gas masks. And the surrounding image includes snarling dogs, police horses, a bullhorn, and a crowd of observers ranging from flower children to kneeling clergymen. In contrast, Heretic leaves itself more open to interpretation, which is likely why it found its way into the Goodman collection. Late in his career, Hirsch mused about what makes veteran artists continue to confront the challenge of a blank canvas. He wrote, “The master is buoyed by the same faith in the future that he felt as a novice—his best work lies ahead.” Carolyn Goodman felt much the same way. Toward the end of her life, she asked a slightly younger friend, “What do you do during the day?” The friend replied, “Nothing. What’s there to do.” When Carolyn later related the story, she said, “What’s there to do? I always wonder instead: Is there time to do everything?” s

Heretic Joseph Hirsch

At the height of the Civil Rights Movement, 20-year-old Andrew Goodman joined the Freedom Summer Project of 1964 to register Black Americans to vote. On his first day in Mississippi, the Ku Klux Klan murdered Andy and two other civil rights workers, James Chaney and Michael Schwerner. Their murders catalyzed a movement to oppose white supremacy and voter suppression throughout the United States and led to the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In 1966, Robert and Carolyn Goodman created The Andrew Goodman Foundation, a 501(c)(3) nonpartisan nonprofit organization, to carry on the spirit and the purpose of their son Andrew’s life. Today, the Foundation counters a surge in anti-democratic policies, laws, and actions that impede our youth and marginalized communities from fully engaging in our democracy. Our programming currently reaches one million students on strategically selected campuses in competitive districts in 25 states and Washington, D.C. We plan to double our reach to two million students by the 2020 election. Youth voting rates are the lowest of any demographic group in the United States. This is despite the fact that voters aged 18-29 are now our country’s largest voting bloc. The Andrew Goodman Foundation works to make young voices and votes a powerful force in democracy by training young leaders, engaging lowpropensity voters, and challenging restrictive voter suppression laws. We mentor a national network of college students and recent graduates who engage in advocacy, organizing, and litigation to increase youth civic power and voting rates. s