SFPS Board Member, David Goodyear, Recognized by his Alma Mater, Reed College, for his Efforts During Freedom Summer, 1964

https://www.reed.edu/reed-magazine/articles/2014/freedom-summer.html / Reed magazine​ / Volume 93, No. 2: June 2014 / Looking Back at Freedom Summer/- Fifty years on, Reedies reflect on the Summer of ’64 / By Nisma Elias ’12 / It was a scorching August night, and there was tension in the air. David Goodyear ’67 and two other civil-rights workers had stopped to buy cokes at a Texaco station in the little town of Laurel, Mississippi. They had traveled to this remote part of the state to register black voters for the Mississippi Freedom Summer Project, a movement that triggered a furious backlash from conservative whites. Days before, the dead bodies of three civil-rights workers had been discovered in Philadelphia, Mississippi, less than 100 miles to the north, beaten and shot by the Ku Klux Klan (KKK). While they quenched their thirst, a car pulled up. Men got out brandishing clubs. The gas station locked its doors and turned out its lights, and Goodyear knew he and his friends were in trouble . . . When the lights of the Texaco Station winked out and the doors were bolted shut, David Goodyear and his two companions knew they were in for trouble. The Freedom House they had been working on to serve as a center for the registration drive in Jones County had stirred up a lot of resentment in the community. Within moments, a group of men confronted them, threw them to the ground, and attacked them. Luckily, someone called the police. “We ourselves would never call the police for any reason, of course,” says Goodyear. “I will never know who that good citizen was or how long the beating with clubs and hob-nailed boots would have continued without the cops rolling by. We were pretty much unconscious by then.” When the case went to court, Goodyear was represented by a lawyer by the name of Ed Koch—who would later become Mayor of New York City. Koch jotted down some notes on the case in the September 1964 issue of The Mississippi Front: “...On Friday, I returned to Laurel to assist in the trial of two more cases. This time they involved two white COFO workers, a young man and woman who had been engaged in voter registration. They had been assaulted—thrown to the ground, kicked and beaten—at a gas station while buying cokes. Their alleged assailant appeared in court with witnesses who testified that he had been at home during the time of the assault watching Bonanza on TV. The cases were dismissed.” The alleged assailant was also the nephew of the judge for the case. During the trial, Goodyear was spat on and told “You’re dead!” by KKK members. Goodyear recounted how even Koch bore his share of spit and RC cola bottles thrown at them in court. “We got out as fast as we could, but the next morning the Laurel newspaper blasted my picture on the front page so everybody in town would know who to look for,” he wrote. “The FBI had given the paper one of the photos they had taken during their ‘investigation.’ A fellow worker named Ulysses and I drove straight back to L.A. the next day without stopping.” Two months later the Freedom House that Goodyear had been building in Laurel was blown up with dynamite. The FBI didn’t solve that case. Goodyear continued to be persecuted by the FBI, who interrogated him for hours. “They were more interested in my political affiliations and the plans of the COFO project than the beating,” says Goodyear, now an artist living in San Francisco. “They opened a file on me and followed my activities for several years after that summer.”