By Lynn Burnett
This piece is primarily based on the powerful biography of Viola Liuzzo, by Mary Stanton: From Selma to Sorrow: The Life and Death of Viola Liuzzo.
Viola Liuzzo was born in 1925, to a mother who was a teacher, and a father who was a coal miner and a World War I veteran. During the Great Depression, her father’s hand was blown off in a mining accident, and Viola’s family became completely dependent on her mother’s meager teaching salary. Viola’s childhood was spent living in one-room shacks with no running water, moving from place to place throughout Georgia and Tennessee as her mother sought work.
“Vi,” as she was affectionally called, left school at age 14. At age 18, she moved by herself to Detroit, where she worked as a cashier and a waitress. She married during her first year in Detroit, had two children, and divorced in 1949. She soon remarried, to a Teamsters union official, who she had another three children with. Vi’s children remember her as a woman who loved taking them on rock collecting expeditions, barefoot nature walks, and to planetariums, rodeos, and circuses. She was energetic and kind: Vi always gave money to the homeless, and drove her husband crazy taking in whatever stray animals she and the children encountered. Vi also read multiple books a week, stayed up late at night journaling, and read Plato and Thoreau to her five kids.
In 1961, when her youngest child was three, Vi started attending night school to become a medical assistant. She graduated with top honors, but was infuriated by gender inequities in the workplace. Men were paid overtime, and women weren’t. When a secretary was laid off without severance pay, Vi turned her own check over to the secretary, and tried to organize other workers to chip in. Vi was fired after she drew public attention to these inequities. She rebelled against injustices in other institutions as well – she was even arrested for protesting the Detroit board of education. However, all of her early protests were solitary and lonely. Vi often felt like she was the only one who cared.
In 1963, Vi began studying philosophy, sociology, and political science at Wayne State University. There, at age 38, she was surrounded by student debates about the civil rights movement. She was soon attending the weekly talks held by the school chaplain, a Christian existentialist named Rev. Malcolm Boyd. Malcolm had been a Freedom Rider who believed in an “ethics of action.” He was derided by conservatives as a “beatnik priest” who held “religious discussions in taverns.” Malcolm responded to such critics by saying that the church needed “to go out to the people, where they are, and learn to speak their language.”
In 1964, Vi’s best friend – a Black woman named Sarah Evans – urged her to join the Detroit chapter of the NAACP. The two friends drove together to New York, to attend a civil rights seminar at the United Nations. The event was sponsored by the Detroit First Unitarian Universalist Church, and Vi began attending the church soon after. It was a hotbed of activism: many of the congregants had been Freedom Riders. Discussions around Selma began swirling on March 7th: Bloody Sunday, when marchers were attacked on Edmund Pettus Bridge. Then, on March 11th, the Unitarian Universalist minister James Reeb was beaten to death in Selma. The church held an emotional memorial. By then, Vi felt that she needed to respond to the call to journey to Selma herself. Those feelings intensified as she participated in pro-Selma marches at the college, where she heard students who had been to Selma share their stories.
When Vi decided to journey to Selma, she knew her husband Jim would protest, and decided not to tell him until she was on the road. When he admonished her by saying, “this isn’t your fight,” she responded by saying, “It’s everybody’s fight.” She drove the thousand miles from Detroit to Selma by herself… a radical action in a world that taught women that it wasn’t even ok to go out to dinner by themselves. Upon arrival, she was put to work welcoming and registering the thousands of volunteers arriving for the big day: March 21st began the five-day, 54 mile march from Selma to Montgomery. During the march, Vi did transportation runs, picking people up from the airport and taking them to Selma or the various camps along the marching route. She also worked with a first aid unit, providing support for people with blisters, pulled muscles, or suffering from heat exhaustion. By the last day, there was an endless stream of people who needed such help.
On the fourth day of the march, the marchers camped at Saint Jude church. In the morning, Vi went up to the church tower with the priest and watched as thousands of people began the final leg of the journey. She was suddenly hit by a panic attack and told the priest: “Father, I have a feeling of apprehension. Something is going to happen today. Someone is going to be killed.” She went into the church to pray before continuing with her tasks.
After the march was completed, Vi kept busy shuttling marchers to the airport. During one of the trips, she stopped at a gas station, where White bystanders hurled insults at the integrated group. A car tailed them and repeatedly slammed into their rear bumper. Vi tried to laugh it off. Later in the day, she drove the 19-year-old civil rights organizer, Leroy Moton, back to Selma. Leroy was the coordinator of the march’s transportation services, and needed to pick up a set of car keys and return them immediately to Montgomery. The two had worked closely together and appreciated each other’s work ethic. They had also been warned that it would be dangerous to have a young Black man driving with a White woman – a fact they were both well aware of. Leroy drove with Vi partly to show other Black organizers that they could trust her.
The two organizers left Selma, headed back to Montgomery to drop off the car keys. Then, Vi was going to take more marchers to the airport. However, as they crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge, a group of Klan members spotted the car. They trailed Vi and Leroy for the next 20 miles. When Vi spotted them, she accelerated to over 90 miles per hour. During the chase, the road narrowed. The shoulders disappeared as the road wound its way through a swamp. The Klan was able to pull alongside the car, and fired into it, shattering Vi’s skull. Leroy grabbed the wheel and was able to safely guide the vehicle off the road and into a ditch. From the Klan’s perspective, it simply looked like the car had veered off the road. When the Klan turned around to inspect the murder, Leroy pretended he was dead: because he was covered in Vi’s blood, it worked.
Viola Liuzzo was the only White woman murdered during the civil rights movement. Her death was treated far differently than any male martyrs of the movement. From the start, the predominant narrative in the media was to blame her as somehow bringing this upon herself. She was a mother, the narrative went, and she shouldn’t have been far away from her children doing risky things. Needless to say, men with children who travelled to Selma didn’t encounter such criticisms: in fact, James Reeb – the White man who had been murdered in Selma just two weeks before Viola – had four children. He was hailed across the nation as a hero… not a reckless father.
The harsh reaction to Vi’s death worsened when it was discovered that one of the men in the car, Tommy Rowe, was the FBI’s top informant inside the Alabama Ku Klux Klan. Tommy had brutally assaulted Freedom Riders, and may have even played a role in the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church. The FBI, in an effort to distract the public eye away from their violent informant and the looming public relations nightmare he represented, launched a campaign to slander Vi’s name.
The FBI dug through Viola and Jim Liuzzo’s medical and financial history. They honed in on her arrest (for protesting), the fact that she had once had a nervous breakdown, and the fact that she had sought family counseling… all in an effort to portray her as unstable. The FBI claimed that Vi had “puncture marks in her arms indicating recent use of a hypodermic needle.” The only punctures the autopsy found were shards of glass. The FBI also used her divorce to enforce the ugly but predictable narrative being spun throughout the White South: that she was having sex with Black men. FBI director Hoover said that Viola had been sitting “very very close to the Negro . . . [the situation] had all the appearances of a necking party.” The news loved a scandal, and coming from an authority like the head of the FBI, they ran with it.
Back home in Detroit, a cross was burned in the Liuzzo family’s backyard. Crowds gathered outside the school of Vi’s 6-year-old, throwing rocks and yelling “N—er lover’s daughter!” Hate mail and threatening phone calls poured in. Someone even purchased the car Vi had been murdered in, because they thought it would be a “crowd drawer” at events. For years, Jim Liuzzo had to hire armed security guards, which gradually drained his bank account. He descended into alcohol abuse and depression. Before she had left for Selma, Vi had asked her friend Sarah Evans if she would watch over the kids if anything happened to her. Especially given Jim’s emotional collapse, Sarah became the primary caregiver to Viola’s children, who called her “grandma.” Sarah also sorted through the bushels of hate mail that arrived every day… and burned it.
Outside of a small circle of Unitarian Universalists and White civil rights activists, Viola Liuzzo found little sympathy in White communities after her death. The Black community, however, knew a FBI smear campaign when they saw one. They were all too familiar with the omnipresent fear-mongering about Black men sleeping with White women, and the way it was used to excuse violence. The Black civil rights community lifted up Vi’s memory when White communities wouldn’t. Martin Luther King even made sure to always invite the Liuzzo family to Christmas, and Coretta King continued to do so after Martin’s assassination. The Liuzzo family, however, never attended… probably because Jim blamed the movement for his wife’s death.
Additional Resources
Documentary: Home of the Brave.
Books:
Gary May: The Informant: The FBI, the Ku Klux Klan, and the Murder of Viola Liuzzo.
Mary Stanton: From Selma to Sorrow: The Life and Death of Viola Liuzzo.
James P. Turner: Selma and the Liuzzo Murder Trials: The First Modern Civil Rights Convictions.
Articles:
Dictionary of Unitarian and Universalist Biography: Viola Liuzzo.
Donna Britt: A white mother went to Alabama to fight for civil rights. The Klan killed her for it.
Gary May: Remembering a Tragic Anniversary: Viola Liuzzo.
Code Switch: Killed For Taking Part In ‘Everybody’s Fight’.
Learning for Justice: Viola Liuzzo.
Wikipedia entry.