What They Gave To Me

I thought I might put this here. It seems appropriate.

From the San Gabriel Valley Tribune---Nov. 1, 2009
written by Steve Lambert

Titled: FEW REMEMBER LIVES LOST TO EARN THE RIGHT TO VOTE

I spoke with Carolyn Goodman twice before she died, and both times left feeling inspired and guilty.

Guilty that I hadn't always stood up for what I believed in.

Guilty about any lost time with my kids.

Guilty for those times I didn't vote.

Carolyn Goodman spoke with passion about all three. Her middle son, Andrew, was murdered in Mississippi during 1964's Freedom Summer -- dying for what he believed in, dying for the right to vote.

Over the years, Andrew Goodman's story has been memorialized in song, film and books. The movie "Mississippi Burning" was loosely based on the events of June 21, 1964, when Goodman, James Chaney and Michael Schwerner were shot to death by a posse near Philadelphia, Miss.

Returning from visiting a black church that had been burned down, the three young men were pulled over by a deputy sheriff, jailed, then released. Back on the road, they were stopped by Ku Klux Klan members, shot to death and buried in an earthen dam nearby.

In the weeks following their disappearance, then-Attorney General Robert Kennedy sent in the FBI to investigate, raising America's already heightened awareness of the Civil Rights movement to a whole new level.

By the time their bodies were unearthed, Goodman, Chaney and Schwerner became part of the national lexicon --embodiments of the brutality of social injustice.

What's often lost in the translation, however, was the purpose of their mission -- to register blacks to vote. The church they visited had been designated a "freedom school" and voter registration center -- a base for freedom riders such as the 20-year-old Goodman, a student from New York.

His mom knew the risks her son was taking, but she and her husband had raised their kids to stand up for what they believed.

Andrew Goodman believed voting was a privilege not to be taken lightly, and died for that right -- in his own country, and months before he himself was old enough to vote.

I spoke by phone with Carolyn Goodman after 9/11 and again before the 2005 trial of Edgar Ray Killen, a former Klan organizer who 41 years after the murders was convicted of manslaughter.

The conversations quickly shifted to voter apathy, and the countless lives lost for something we take for granted.

She died in 2007, but her words, her passion, her mother's heart still ring true.

Tuesday's an election in many of our communities. Please take the time to vote.

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Steve Lambert is editor and publisher of the San Gabriel Valley Newspaper Group.

Larryj