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Very sorry for your loss, Roger. But, thanks to the bravery of your friend, yourself and many others, this country moved to a higher plane of freedom and democracy, for all. I thank Andy, you and all the rest for that. Sincerely.

And yet, here you are, still fighting the good fight. Freedom for all will win out in the end, maybe not in ten years, maybe not in a hundred, but tyrants and despots will not rule forever.

Wow, that’s something, Roger. I was only 14 years old, but I remember it very well. I lived in Maryland at the time, and my best friend lived up the street. His dad was an unreconstructed cracker from Tidewater Virginia who (which I didn’t know and didn’t understand at the time) filled his head with racist boilerplate.

I had never had any contact to speak of with black people, but the things that my friend told me made me uneasy. You know, black people are monkeys, they’re not human, blah blah. That might seem ridiculous now, but to a 14-yr-old in 1962, it was not something I could reject out of hand. I went to my mom, and I said, “Eddie’s saying these things about black people, is this true?”

I’ve never forgotten what she said. She said, “Don’t judge people by what they are, judge them by who they are.” I was smart enough to understand the implied put-down there. I never thought of my friend the same way after that.

The years of the civil rights movement at its apogee were the worst and best of times.

My mother’s family has been in North Carolina since colonial days and I spent considerable time there while growing up. The contrasts between the segregated South and my every day metropolitan New York milieu were stark (although perhaps not quite as stark as one might wish or hope). But even so I was quite unprepared for the images of Bull Connor and firehoses and beatings and attack dogs that would come to exemplify, in part, the essense of the civil rights struggle. Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas might as well have been on another planet.

I can’t tell you how much I admired those among my peers like Roger who risked life and limb to join the ranks of the freedom fighters. My parents never would have allowed such a thing and, to be perfectly honest, I never would have seriously considered it either. But that did not mean that I didn’t understand who among us walked on the side of the angels. We owe a great debt to Andy and Michael and James and Roger and everyone else who during those terrible, wonderful years were not content to merely watch from the sidelines and proffered deeds rather than words. Here’s to each and every one of you.

People in Iraq’s mass graves don’t have European-sounding names like Chaney, or Goodman, or Schwerner, but a great number of those poor people dumped under sand also did SOMETHING BRAVE, that weíll probably never know about, to stand up to Saddam’s brutality and injustice–something that they didn’t have to do.

I just wish the “liberal” civil rights activists of the 1960’s–those now over on the far-left fringe–cared even 1/100th as much about Saddam’s human carnage than they do about Mr. Chaney, and Mr. Goodman, and Mr. Schwerner–and rightly so.

These other oppressed countries have their heroes too, but the isolationist American Left has become much more anti-American now than pro-justice. Justice for the TRULY oppressed (outside America) is only for lip service, because we can’t risk one American life to fix it. How did that happen? I just don’t understand it. I guess hate makes people stupid. That’s the only way to explain the modern American Left.

RBMN,

Mr. Goodman was an honorable man who died taking action in defense of a just cause. There was a meaning to his death just as there is a meaning to the deaths of those giving their lives in defense of freedom today.

I believe that it is an error to conflate in any way – even in contradistinction – his actions with those who have stolen and abused the label of liberal.

Let us remember an honorable man for his acts of courage and leave disparagement of those unfit to be mentioned here to another thread.

On the good fight, George Will:

Where do they come from, people like Simeon Wright, people of such resilience and grace? From Mississippi and Illinois. And everywhere else. They are all around us.

What has this country done — what can any country do — to deserve such people? Wrong question. They are this country.”

I visited the church site as well as the actual site of the tragedy when I toured the Southeast in March. Very tragic.

A mountain in the Adirondack State Park of NY State was relatively recently named after Andrew Goodman. Here’s a link to an AP story about that: http://www.capitalnews9.com/content/top_stories/default.asp?ArID=136792