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Former Phoenix Vice Mayor Calvin C. Goode has passed away
Goode was 91 years old when he died.
PHOENIX - FOX 10 has learned that former Phoenix City Councilmember Calvin C. Goode has passed away.
FOX 10 profiled Goode in a news report in 2017 about George Washington Carver High School, which was located just south of Downtown Phoenix. Goode graduated from that school.
According to the website of the George Washington Carver Museum and Cultural Center, the school was built specifically for African Americans, due to local sentiment which urged racial separation among high school students, even though Arizona did not mandate high school segregation at the time.
"As an American citizen, I feel I was entitled to all the rights and privileges of anyone else born in this country, but we also had restaurants and theaters and schools that were segregated," Goode said in 2017. "I think that is wrong."
According to the website The HistoryMakers, which bills itself as having the country's largest African American video oral history collection, Goode later worked for Carver High as an accountant in 1949, and later ran his own tax accounting business.
Good, according to The HistoryMakers, won election to the Phoenix City Council in 1972.
According to the City of Phoenix's website, Goode had a 22-year tenure with the Phoenix City Council. The city has honored Goode by naming an award after him. Goode himself was actually the winner of the Calvin C. Goode Lifetime Achievement Award in 1994, according to the City's website.
In addition, Phoenix city officials have named a city government building after him: the Calvin C. Goode Municipal Building.
"It is an honor and I appreciate the building and the artifacts in the building," Goode said in 2017.
In his later years, Goode was known for his work to preserving the memory of the high school he once attended. Carver High closed its doors in 1954, the same year school segregation was declared unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education ruling.
According to a statement released by Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego, Goode, who was 93 when he died, was preceded in death by his wife, Georgie. Mayor Gallego also says flags in the city will be lowered to half staff in remembrance of Goode.
In a statement, Arizona State House Democratic Leader Reginald Bolding called Goode an "unshakeable force for progress, equality and civil rights."
"Over the span of six decades, he changed his city and our community for the better in countless, immeasurable ways," Bolding's statement read, in part.