Before beginning his academic career, Goodwyn's career as an investigative journalist motivated him to get involved in political activism alongside African American, Latino, and white working class groups. He continued documenting the movement in Montgomery, Alabama, and met
James Bevel, a leader of the
Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Duke University hired Goodwyn as a professor in 1971. There, he and his colleagues,
William Chafe and Ray Gavins, created Duke's oral history program. According to the
New York Times, the program "employed many black graduate students, in part because Dr. Goodwyn insisted that whites should not have sole possession of Southern history." Not only did Goodwyn teach his students anti-racism, but he heavily emphasized that he, as a white man, constituted "part of the problem of authority," radically owning his own privilege. In 1976, he published his most well-known work, Democratic Promise: The Populist Moment in America—a book read widely at universities across the U.S. Based on deep archival research and building on extracts from this extensive literature, as his "Essay on Sources" demonstrates, Goodwyn's book entirely revised the historiography of American populism and re-establishes it on the basis of solid documentary evidence compellingly quoted. Goodwyn retired from Duke University in 2003. ==Personal life and death==