In her youth, she helped farm workers to organize and was active in community efforts to support the Republican faction during the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s.

The next year, Goodman and a friend went to West Virginia to live in a coal mining town and sought to advocate to the governor over the poor working conditions there.

[4] After Walden, Goodman enrolled the Honors Program at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and considered a drama major, but withdrew after one semester after falling ill with pneumonia.

He returned to New York City to improve his health and was selected for a role in the Off-Broadway play The Chief Thing by Russian dramatist Nikolaí Evreninov.

[4] The senators could not persist in this polite debate over the future dignity of a human race if the white Northerners were not so shockingly apathetic.In the spring of 1964, his junior year at Queens College, Goodman attended a talk by Mississippi civil rights activists Aaron Henry, head of the state's NAACP branch, and Fannie Lou Hamer.

[4] In June 1964, Goodman left New York to teach at a Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) training session for Freedom Summer volunteers at the Western College for Women (now part of Miami University) in Oxford, Ohio.

At the training, Schwerner learned that one of the Freedom Schools in Mississippi that he had helped to organize at the Mount Zion Methodist Church in Philadelphia had been burned down by the Ku Klux Klan (KKK).

An autopsy of Goodman, showing fragments of red clay in his lungs and grasped in his fists, suggests he was probably buried alive alongside the already dead Chaney and Schwerner.

Mitchell, who had already earned fame for helping secure convictions in several other high-profile civil rights era murder cases, including the assassination of Medgar Evers in Jackson, Mississippi, the Birmingham, Alabama 16th Street Baptist Church bombing, and the murder of Vernon Dahmer in Mississippi, developed new evidence, found new witnesses and pressured the state to take action.

Barry Bradford, an Illinois high-school teacher later famous for helping clear the name of civil rights martyr Clyde Kennard, and three students, Allison Nichols, Sarah Siegel, and Brittany Saltiel, joined Mitchell's efforts.

Bradford and his students' documentary, produced for the National History Day contest, presented important new evidence and compelling reasons for reopening the Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner case.

Mitchell was able to determine the identity of "Mr. X", the mystery informer who had helped the FBI discover the bodies and smash the conspiracy of the Klan in 1964, in part using evidence developed by Bradford and the students.

After the death of Robert Goodman in 1969, Carolyn continued the work of the Foundation, focusing on projects like a reverse march to Mississippi and a 25th Anniversary Memorial.

The memorial, which took place at St. John The Divine Church in NYC, was attended by 10,000 people and was presided by Governor Mario Cuomo, Maya Angelou, Pete Seeger, Aaron Henry, Harry Belafonte, and others closely associated with the Civil Rights Movement.

In 2014, on the fiftieth anniversary of the murders, the Foundation officially launched Vote Everywhere program designed to support college students who are continuing the work of Freedom Summer.