A parent’s worst nightmare


 

Fifty years ago on June 21, civil rights activists Michael Schwerner ’61, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman were murdered in Mississippi by a white supremacist mob. These “Mississippi Burning” murders are recounted in the new book, “My Mantelpiece: A Memoir of Survival and Social Justice” (Why Not Books), co-authored by Brad Herzog ’90 and the late Carolyn Drucker Goodman '36, mother of the slain Andrew.

The book also tells of Carolyn Goodman’s life of loss (including a brother’s premature death, childhood molestation, a mother’s callousness, a father’s suicide, her son’s infamous murder and two husbands’ deaths), survival and social activism. After her son’s murder, Goodman founded The Andrew Goodman Foundation, organized an anniversary Freedom Summer, and produced documentary films celebrating young activists.

An excerpt of the book is the cover story in the May/June issue of Cornell Alumni Magazine. In the book’s foreword, Maya Angelou writes: “Those three young men represent 300,000 young men and women who dared, who had the courage to go to the lion’s den and try to scrub the lion’s teeth.”

Herzog has written more than 30 books, including a trilogy of travel memoirs, which the American Book Review described as “the new classics of American travel writing.” 

-- Susan S. Lang