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224 I t was a constant, ambivalent feeling,” Goodman remembered of the early 1950s. “Year after year, case after case came along. The stress, not only on myself, but other lawyers in the same predicament, it was enormous .” Goodman believed that history was “ultimately” on his side. “Yet you knew that the public at large was hostile,” that it believed you were wrong and what you were doing was wrong. And it affected not only yourself . . . but it affected your family as well, your relations with other people whom you knew, your friends. . . . So there wasn’t the feeling, you know, of the martyr going to the stake and “I’m going to die for a cause and history will absolve me,” sort of thing. It was “what am I going to do tomorrow, the next day? What about the kids?”1 There were the occasional moments when it was hard to ignore the physical risks involved. He must have felt like a targeted man in Mississippi when the Jackson Daily News editorialized that it was too bad the courts could not “send some lawyers to the electric chair along with their clients.” When the crosstown paper published a large photo of Goodman and Abzug on the day of McGee’s execution, he must have felt like the target was on his back. Closer to home, the hate mail arriving in the CRC’s Detroit offices included one petition to “Save Willie McGee” that had been scornfully filled with mock names (“Stealin Stalin,” “Freddie Fascist”), all fictitious but one: “No good Goodman, Lawyer’s Guilt [sic],” with “DROP DEAD” scrawled across the page in heavy red crayon. The most frequent reminder of his pariah status, however, came from the kind of spontaneous shunning that Crockett experienced after the Foley Square trial. No matter where Goodman turned, “you’re walking down the street downtown and you see people that you know . . . for many years [and] . . . they would walk across the street [so] they wouldn’t have 7 Getting By “ G E T T I N G B Y 225 to say hello. . . . You’re constantly being made aware of that, that you were isolated and on the outside, sort of quarantined, a leper in your thinking and what you are doing.” You had to “sort of get accustomed to it,” as he later said of the quiet spurning. “You do develop some armor against it so it doesn’t hurt you so much.” It was harder to protect two sons who had to deal with the fact that “everybody,” as his oldest boy Dick recalled, knew their father “was lawyer for the Reds and so you got a certain amount of static from that.” Son Bill, at age thirteen, wondered why his father was so different. “Gee Dad,” he remembered asking after people on the street had turned away, “doesn’t anybody like you?” Goodman knew it was tough for his kids, “but they withstood it pretty well. . . . We always had to keep explaining, keep telling them what we were doing and why we were doing it.”2 The two boys found their father’s explanation convincing enough to emulate his career in the 1950s and join his law firm in the 1960s. Dick, who graduated from Central High School the same spring that Willie McGee was executed, got his bachelor’s degree from the University of Michigan in 1955 and his law degree from the University of Chicago three years later. Bill went to a different high school (Mumford) but the same law school, graduating in 1964 and immediately entering his father’s firm, four years after his brother. For all the political turmoil surrounding their father’s career over the preceding twenty years, they had grown up in a relatively peaceful setting in the home on Warrington Drive. The neighborhood’s remaining lots filled up with new houses, some bought by Jewish families moving north from the Dexter-Davison area, where Ernie’s mother still lived. Central High at the corner of Linwood and Tuxedo streets (his father’s alma mater by name, but moved to a new building four miles northwest of its old site) was by Dick’s recollection 75 percent Jewish when he graduated, with a small but growing number of black students. (There were “some white—uh, Gentile kids, too,” he recalled on one occasion, slipping into the same vernacular merging of ethnicity and race that his father had learned in the old ghetto...

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