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Carolyn Goodman

October 6, 1915–August 17, 2007

by JWA Staff
Our work to expand the Encyclopedia is ongoing. We are providing this brief biography for Carolyn Goodman until we are able to commission a full entry.

Carolyn Goodman.
Courtesy of the Andrew Goodman Foundation.

As a psychologist, Carolyn Goodman created early intervention programs for at-risk families, but when her son, Andrew Goodman, was killed during Freedom Summer, she became a powerful civil rights activist. Goodman earned a bachelor’s degree from Cornell in 1936, a master’s in psychology from CUNY in 1953 and a doctorate from Columbia University Teachers College in 1968. She focused her attention on children and parents with psychological problems and ran the PACE Family Treatment Center for mothers with emotional disorders. In 1964, her son and two other civil rights workers were murdered in Mississippi. Goodman helped bring national attention to the murders and spent the rest of her life speaking out for civil rights while continuing to work as a therapist and teacher. In 1968 she and her husband created the Andrew Goodman Foundation to support young activists. In 2005, at age ninety, she travelled to Mississippi to testify at the trial of one of the Klan members who had participated in her son’s murder. At the time of her death, she was professor emerita in psychiatry at Albert Einstein College of Medicine.

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How to cite this page

Jewish Women's Archive. "Carolyn Goodman." (Viewed on December 9, 2024) <https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/goodman-carolyn>.