Betty Garman Robinson was a young college student in New York when the sit-in movement was launched in 1960. She helped to organize discussion groups that brought together hundreds of White students to discuss how they could be in solidarity from the North. This experience led her to study racial justice movements as a graduate student at UC Berkeley.
After Betty formed an organization to support the Southern freedom struggle, she was put in touch with SNCC’s Executive Director, Jim Forman. In 1964, she dropped out of college and moved to Atlanta to work for SNCC full time. As the group’s official Northern Coordinator, her task was to mobilize resources and student support, from outside the South. This included being the lead organizer of the Friends of SNCC groups across the country, which served to plug people into movement news and events, and communicated the needs of the movement to people throughout the nation.
Friends of SNCC chapters could be called on to throw parties to raise bail funds, host demonstrations, or make phone calls to local legislators or radio stations to spread news or generate outside pressure. “At the height of SNCC’s work,” Betty recalled, “we could organize large coordinated demonstrations in fifty northern cities simultaneously, with only a few days notice.” Friends of SNCC played a major role in recruiting people across the country to head south and volunteer on the ground. They also saved people’s lives: the outside pressure and attention Friends of SNCC generated meant that violence against SNCC workers in the South would get national attention… something White Southern leaders tried hard to avoid.
Betty also worked to make sure that the Southern SNCC folks in the field understood the importance of the Northern work, which sometimes felt distant to them, and that the folks in the North felt valued by the movement even though they weren’t in the thick of it. Over the decades, she continued to work on a range of racial justice issues from housing to healthcare and community organizing. In recent years, she helped found SURJ Baltimore, commenting: “In the 1960s, SNCC told us to go into the white community because this is where the power lay. Sixty years later it is clearly a necessary focus for white organizers to be doing this and undermining white supremacy.”
Betty Garman Robinson passed away in October, 2020: May she rest in power.
During the civil rights era, Anne Braden worked for the Southern Conference Educational Fund (SCEF), which was dedicated to organizing White southerners for racial and economic justice. However, despite Anne being one of the most famous White antiracists in U.S. history, the story of the organization she worked for is little known…
Launched in 1942, SCEF was originally the educational branch of the Southern Conference for Human Welfare. SCHW was one of the “popular front” organizations during the 30s and 40s that brought liberals together with socialists and communists in order to fight the threat of fascism. After World War II, popular front coalitions began to crumble, and under the pressures of McCarthyism disintegrated almost entirely. As a successful popular front organization advocating anti-lynching legislation, widespread voter registration, labor unions, equal schooling, and other civil and economic rights issues throughout the South, the SCHW came under special attack… although it was largely undermined not by segregationists, but by anticommunist liberalism from within. Even after the SCHW folded in 1948, however, its educational branch SCEF was able to hold on, and branch out into its own organization.
One of SCEF’s major goals was to meticulously document racial inequity in all its forms… and then build support for racial justice by showing how those inequities held back the South as an entire region, and led to inferior schooling, healthcare, and employment for the majority of White southerners, as well as Black. SCEF’s newspaper, the Southern Patriot, communicated these inequities and the struggles against them to members of the old popular front, even after much of that front had crumbled. It also highlighted examples of White antiracism, in the hopes that those examples might inspire other White people.
SCEF polled White university workers, doctors, politicians, and other White Southerners about their racial attitudes. By gathering such information, they discovered which White populations were more open to some level of integration… groups that included White university and medical workers. SCEF leveraged this information by encouraging, for example, leadership in White hospitals to consider accepting Black patients or training Black doctors. SCEF then used its large network to fundraise for any southern institution willing to take on such efforts. In other words, part of SCEF’s work was to discover cracks in the edifice of segregation and widen them; to figure out where anti-segregationist embers lay buried in the White South and stoke them.
The 1954 Supreme Court ruling Brown v. Board of Education brought mass hysteria and resistance to the South, leading the full weight of McCarthyist redbaiting to come crashing down on SCEF. For over a decade, the organization was under intense assault, including police raids of its offices and the homes of its leaders. At the same time, the Montgomery bus boycott began in late 1955, and opened the door for SCEF to begin working closely with the civil rights movement. Black freedom struggle leaders such as E.D. Nixon of Montgomery and Fred Shuttlesworth of Birmingham joined the organization, and Martin Luther King began working closely with the group. It was during this time that Anne and Carl Braden joined SCEF.
Despite living under assault, during the civil rights era SCEF did incredible work. The organization leveraged its network to raise funds for legal aid and bail money for the movement, as well as other necessary funds due to the crippling economic retaliation waged by the White South. SCEF brought doctors in from the North to provide medical aid, which was critical given the refusal of White hospitals to treat Black people (as well as White civil rights workers). After the sit-ins of 1960, SCEF hosted workshops for the sit-in students to help them cultivate fundraising and journalism skills. And Anne Braden, as a brilliant journalist, kept White antiracists around the country informed of events through the Southern Patriot.
During the Black Power era of the late 1960s, however, SCEF entered a decline. When groups such as SNCC transitioned into all-Black organizations, many White SNCC members poured into SCEF. The Southern Conference Educational Fund fully agreed with the Black Power position that White racial justice activists should focus on organizing White communities, and initiated projects designed to mobilize poor southern Whites and build Black-White working class unity. However, unlike the patient grassroots organizing of the early SNCC years, where SNCC organized rural Black southerners through embedding themselves in the community and engaging in deep listening, many of the new White members of SCEF put their own need to prove how revolutionary they were front and center. This alienated the poor White working class people they were trying to organize. These new White members also tended to view the very people they were trying to organize as the enemy. As Anne Braden put it, “They just didn’t like white people! You can’t organize people if you don’t like them.”
During the Black Power era, SCEF remained committed to being an integrated organization, out of the concern that if it became an all-White organization racism could easily creep in. However, Black Power militants within the group were upset with SCEF’s resources going towards building up White antiracist efforts instead of to Black communities, and tensions escalated into violent standoffs which, combined with dogmatic ideological disputes between the young White self-styled “revolutionaries”, crippled the organization. Anne and Carl Braden, as well as the rest of the staff who had built SCEF, left the organization before it completely imploded. In Anne Braden’s words, “I had spent sixteen years of my life building that organization and saw it destroyed in six months.” It broke her heart. Anne’s biographer Cate Fosl writes, “What three decades of attacks had failed to do was accomplished from within.” It was also true that local police and the FBI leveraged these internal tensions and played a role in turning members of the organization against one another, as they did with racial justice organizations across the nation.
Featured image: GROW meeting in a cow pasture, where Klan rallies had traditionally been held.
In late 1966, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee had not yet become an all-Black organization, but it was headed quickly in that direction. By this time, the organization that had grown out of the sit-ins, conducted freedom rides, and become the most effective civil rights organization in terms of grassroots organizing had asked its White members to focus on organizing White communities for racial justice. Stokely Carmichael in particular emphasized the importance of organizing poor White folks.
Bob Zellner – one of SNCC’s very first White members – took SNCC’s new direction to heart. He and his wife Dottie Zellner founded Grass Roots Organizing Work, with a mission statement that read: “We want to begin the serious long-range effort to organize the white people in the south into an equal force in strength and similar in commitment to the movement now flourishing in the Black community . . . so that interracial coalitions, based on common interest, can be formed.”
Bob and Dottie originally hoped that GROW would work in connection with SNCC. As Dottie writes, “I . . . thought that white people could not be organized in a vacuum; there had to be some black presence if such organizing were not to degenerate into racist activities.” As Bob writes in his autobiography, he also hoped to help poor White southerners “link up with the expertise and the experience and drive that existed in the black community.” After all the other White SNCC members had left the organization, the Zellner’s stayed on to present the project idea to SNCC. They knew that the project moved against the direction SNCC was headed in, but at the same time they were two of the most trusted White members of SNCC, and had the support of many of the older and more experienced members. However, the project was rejected, after which the Zellners became the last White members to leave the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.
The couple moved to New Orleans in 1967 and launched GROW with the support of Anne and Carl Braden’s organization, the Southern Conference Educational Fund. They chose New Orleans because it was easy to access both Mississippi and Alabama, and because it was safe: they didn’t want to move to a rural southern area where they’d have to waste time, energy and resources defending themselves. GROW began reaching out to poor White folks through their extensive network of Black southern civil rights workers, who had encountered sympathetic Whites over their years of organizing. For example, Fannie Lou Hamer put GROW in touch with poor White southerners who she had built connections with.
However, GROW found that the White rural poor were so desperate that asking them to spend additional time organizing when they were struggling just to survive was too big of an ask. As Bob Zellner remembers: “They were all so poor. We stayed with them during the winter in houses so ramshackle the wind blew straight through.” Many of them didn’t own shoes. In addition to their dire poverty, some of the White sharecroppers and other rural poor were scared to death that their overseers would retaliate if they found out they took a literacy class or organizing workshop with GROW. Unlike the Black rural poor, they didn’t have a broader movement to look to or feel inspired by: their fear was crippling. GROW concluded that they needed social services before they could organize, and GROW wasn’t equipped to offer that. As GROW member Robert Analavage wrote, “These are people who must eventually be a part of any movement we build, but they do not have the strength to be the spearhead of it.”
And so, GROW turned its attention away from severe rural poverty and towards factory workers and unionization efforts. GROW’s first breakthrough was with a group of woodworkers who were on strike in Laurel, Mississippi. Laurel was a Klan hotspot, and some of the country’s most notorious Klansmen were part of the strike. Bob Zellner’s own father had been a Klansman, and he knew how to talk with them. The workers accepted a meeting with Bob, and he opened by being upfront about his background as a SNCC worker. Then he described the new GROW project: “We work with black and white people who believe they are stronger working together with each other rather than against each other. If we can help you, we want to.” A Klan leader named Herbert Ishey slammed his fist down on the table: “Goddammit, I don’t care who you are. We need help from wherever we can get it. You think you’re the only one’s who have trouble with the FBI. They call us Kluxers. We don’t care, commies or Kluxers, we need to get together.”
With the support of GROW the woodworkers were soon holding drive-in rallies with thousands of Black and White workers, in the same cow pastures where Klan rallies were held, “talking about how the power structure was holding them down.” As Bob Zellner recalls, “We had 1,500, 2,000 workers, half Black, half white, half with Wallace stickers and half with NAACP stickers, in the cow pasture meeting together. This is in 1968, ’69, in Mississippi.” Although GROW was a primarily White-led organization, there were also Black militants – like Republic of New Afrika member Walter Collins – on staff. Like many Black Power militants, Walter believed in the transformational power of organizing poor Whites for racial and economic justice. He built his own relationships with old Klan members, and between his efforts and the Zellners, GROW got Black workers and Klan members to go leafleting together in integrated groups with flyers that said, “Come to the working people’s rally”. Mississippi had never seen anything like it.
GROW would continue such work for ten years, not only with woodworkers but also with workers in the poultry and fishing industries. How did GROW do it? Just as they had done in their civil rights work, the members of GROW embedded themselves in the communities they worked with, got to know the people, practiced humility and respect across their differences, and built trust. They provided considerable benefits to those they worked with by facilitating connections to their network of movement lawyers and researchers. And they emphasized practical, material change over idealism. As Bob Zellner put it to one group of White workers: “If you’re going to have a strong union, you must have black and white in there. You know you don’t want black people crossing the picket lines, and you can’t have segregated drinking fountains and bathrooms and lockers, the way you had before . . . You have to do more than you ever expected to, but when you do that, then you have strength and they can’t beat you.” GROW emphasized that segregation led to poorer jobs, schools, and healthcare for everyone. They urged skeptical White workers to at least give it a shot… try some new behavior and see what happens to your ideas, they would say. And to some extent it worked: the ideas of these White southern workers did indeed begin to change. GROW shifted a lot of folks away from the Klan, without ever telling them they were bad people. As Dottie Zellner put it, GROW’s work “proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that on a grass-roots level, it is possible to create working-class interracial coalitions. Period.”
Born in 1805, William Lloyd Garrison founded the weekly abolitionist newspaper “The Liberator” in 1831. The paper was an uncompromising assault on slavery, calling not for its gradual end, but for complete and immediate abolition with no compensation to slave owners. Garrison opened the founding issue with these words: “I am aware that many object to the severity of my language; but is there not cause for severity? I will be as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice. On this subject, I do not wish to think, or speak, or write, with moderation. No! No! Tell a man whose house is on fire to give a moderate alarm; tell him to moderately rescue his wife from the hands of the ravisher; tell the mother to gradually extricate her babe from the fire into which it has fallen;—but urge me not to use moderation in a cause like the present.”
Garrison viewed the press as an essential tool for political change. The Liberator published Black abolitionist voices, first-hand accounts of slavery, and as such quickly gained traction in free Black communities throughout the North. Soon it spread to a White readership in the thousands, and helped to strengthen a network of committed abolitionists. Garrison and other leading abolitionists built on this momentum by founding the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1833. The organization “drew violent reactions from slave interests in both the Southern and Northern states, with mobs breaking up anti-slavery meetings, assaulting lecturers, ransacking anti-slavery offices, burning postal sacks of anti-slavery pamphlets, and destroying anti-slavery presses. Healthy bounties were offered in Southern states for the capture of Garrison, ‘dead or alive.’” Despite such harassment, by 1838 the Anti-Slavery Society had 1,350 chapters, and boasted 250,000 members.
Garrison also used The Liberator to call for women’s rights, and was an early advocate of women’s right to vote. He urged women to engage in mass petitioning against slavery, welcomed their contributions to The Liberator, and invited them to become prominent members of the American Anti-Slavery Society. When the London-based World Anti-Slavery Convention refused to seat the female delegates sent by the U.S., Garrison gave up his seat and sat with the women in the spectator’s gallery.
Following the abolition of slavery in 1865, William Lloyd Garrison closed The Liberator, resigned from the American Antislavery Society, and called for the formation of new organizations to push for civil rights. The Antislavery Society remained active for five more years, when the 15th Amendment granted Black Americans the right to vote. When Garrison passed away in 1879, his friend Frederick Douglas delivered his eulogy: “It was the glory of this man that he could stand alone with the truth, and calmly await the result . . . He was unusually modest and retiring in his disposition; but his zeal was like fire, and his courage like steel, and during all his fifty years of service, in sunshine and storm, no doubt or fear as to the final result ever shook his manly breast or caused him to swerve an inch from the right line of principle.”
William Lewis Moore was a Baltimore-based postal worker, who organized with the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) during the civil rights movement. In addition to participating in many protests with CORE, the former Marine also advocated for the rights of people experiencing trauma and mental health issues. William also undertook three one-man marches, in which he marched to three different capitals to hand-deliver letters urging government leaders to end Jim Crow.
William’s first solitary march was a 30-mile walk from Baltimore to Annapolis, during which he wore a large sign around his neck that read “End Segregation in Maryland” on one side, and “Equal Rights for All Men” on the other. His second march was to Washington D.C. In a letter he hoped would be delivered to President Kennedy, William notified the President that he would be marching to the capital of Mississippi next.
In April of 1963, this mailman-for-racial-justice began a 375-mile march from Chattanooga, Tennessee, to Jackson Mississippi. He contacted journalists to let them know about his effort: he believed it would make a good story, and hoped that media attention might spread a message of racial justice to other White folks. William believed that there were plenty of “good” White folks in the South, and that they just needed to be reached.
As William marched through Tennessee, he wore a sign that read “Eat at Joe’s, Both Black and White” on one side, and “Equal Rights for All (Mississippi of Bust)” on the other. He pushed a mailcart containing an extra pair of clothes and a blanket – during the trek William camped on the side of the road. The mailman posted an image of Jesus on the front of his mailcart, with the words: “Wanted – agitator, carpenter by trade, revolutionary, consorter with criminals and prostitutes.”
William Moore’s mailcart was also loaded with copies of the letter that he intended to put directly into the hands of Mississippi Governor Ross Barnett. The letter read: “The White man cannot be truly free himself until all men have their rights. Each is dependent upon the other. Do not go down in infamy as one who fought the democracy for all which you have not the power to prevent. Be gracious. Give more than is immediately demanded of you.” During his solitary walk, William passed copies of the letter to everyone he could, from farmers on the side of the road, to the waitress at a diner where he stopped for breakfast. Some people looked at the letters with confusion, others tore them up, or simply handed them back. Most people were polite, while making it clear that they disagreed with William… and that they hoped he made it to Mississippi safely.
William Moore’s body was found on the side of the road, about 70 miles into his walk, with two bullets in his head. An investigation tracked down the owner of the gun: a Klan member named Floyd Simpson, who was known to have confronted William earlier that day. Witnesses had also seen a car that matched Floyd’s near where William Moore’s body had been found. Southern courts, however, were uninterested in pursuing the murderer of a civil rights worker. No one was ever charged.
In an effort to show that the movement would not allow violence to overcome nonviolent direct action, members of CORE and SNCC quickly mobilized a small group of marchers to finish William Moore’s Freedom March. When they requested that the Justice Department offer them protection, the Department refused. The group was led by Dianne Nash, who was a veteran of the sit-ins and Freedom Rides. The small group started from the spot where William Moore had been murdered, and were quickly arrested.
A second group of ten marchers then began their march from William Moore’s starting point in Chattanooga. Amongst them were SNCC executive secretary James Forman, and White SNCC organizers Bob Zellner and Sam Shirah. During the march, they were pelted with rocks, bottles, and firecrackers, injuring a number of the marchers. (In his autobiography, Bob Zellner almost shrugs this off: “no snipers… no serious injuries.”) As they approached the Alabama state line, they were met by a line of policemen blocking the road… as well as a mob of 1,500 angry White people.
The arch-segregationist governor of Alabama, George Wallace, had been Sam Shirah’s Sunday school teacher, and Sam called him to request peaceful passage through Alabama. Instead, when the marchers refused to disperse and crossed the state line, the police beat them and shocked them with cattle prods. Bob Zellner describes the cattle prods as a form of police torture: “It felt like being hit with lightning . . . It’s one of the worst pains you can imagine.” The prods “burn you and cause you to go into spasms. When the police used the electrical charge on us, the crowd just went into a frenzy.” The CORE newspaper reported the crowd cheering: “Get the goddamn communists! Throw the ni—ers in the river! Kill ‘em!” The group was locked up on death row for 31 days before securing release. During that time they were fed biscuits with shards of glass baked into them. Some of marchers hardly ate for an entire month.
For Sam Shirah, the murder of William Moore and the police torturing of the marchers marked an important turning point. Sam was committed to mobilizing White support for the civil rights movement, and was concerned that if the dominant images of White people in the movement were of them being beaten or murdered, that getting involved in the movement would feel too daunting for the vast majority of potential White sympathizers. Sam began to reconceptualize the role of the White civil rights organizer as being less about putting their bodies on the line for the movement – or even putting themselves in Black Freedom Struggle spaces – and more about going into White communities and developing support. As he later explained: “I think we liberal and radical whites have been wrong in our orientation. We’ve been trying to bring white people into the movement as it now exists. Instead, we should seek to take the Movement into the white communities.”
Sam Shirah would go on to play a pivotal role in two efforts to mobilize White southerners, first in the Southern Student Organizing Committee, and then in SNCC’s White Folks Project. Bob Zellner also went on to engage in like-minded work, especially by founding an organization called GROW that focused on organizing poor White southerners for racial justice during the Black Power era.
Although the murder of William Moore was largely forgotten in the swirl of larger civil rights events, the folk singer Phil Ochs later memorialized the postman in song:
“And they shot him on the Alabama road
Forgot about what the Bible told
They shot him with that letter in his hand
As though he were a dog and not a man
And they shot him on the Alabama road…”
And Pete Seeger sang:
“One day you had a message You felt you had to shout It wasn’t an ordinary message Took you beyond your route
The message dealt with brotherhood And love and friendship too It wasn’t a regular message So they wouldn’t let you through
They stopped you, William Moore, I know But your message did get through For they can kill a man for sure But not his message too.”
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.
Vernon Bown was a White member of the Wade Defense Committee, a group that was formed to defend the home of Andrew and Charlotte Wade. The Wade’s were a Black family who, with the support of Anne and Carl Braden, had purchased a home in a segregated White neighborhood in Louisville. When crosses were burned in front of the house and shots were fired into it, supporters of the Wade’s formed an armed defense committee. Most members had to work during the day, but as a truck driver who worked the night shift, Vernon Bown was able to protect the Wade family’s home during the daylight hours. As a former soldier who had volunteered to fight the rise of fascism in Spain in the years preceding World War II, protecting the Wade’s home was a job Bown was well prepared to do.
When the house was bombed and a trial ensued, the White supporters of the Wades were hauled before McCarthyite courts, where their support for desegregation was deemed subversive activity. While Anne and Carl Braden were the main targets of this trial, Vernon Bown’s commitment to living in a Black home and to protecting it – with force if necessary – was also viewed as evidence of a subversion of the social order. While the Braden’s were charged with sedition, it was Bown who was charged with the actual bombing of the Wade house… despite overwhelming evidence that the bombing was conducted by segregationists. Luckily, when the case reached the Supreme Court, the charges were dropped.
Bown, who was born in 1917, lived until 2012, at which point he was one of the last surviving members of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade of American volunteers who had fought fascism in Spain. According to The Volunteer, a website dedicated to Brigade veterans, in his old age Bown “grew his own garden and kept his own bees to make honey. He enjoyed going on walks and dancing at the senior center as often as he could.”
During the Civil War, Radical Republican leader Thaddeus Stevens led the charge for the immediate abolition of slavery, the enlistment of Black soldiers, land redistribution to secure economic stability for freed slaves, and the right to vote. The congressman introduced a bill to abolish slavery shortly after the war began, and was exasperated when Lincoln took another year merely to call for emancipation in the border-states. Thaddeus and his fellow Radical Republicans – called radical because of their call for immediate abolition – held Lincoln’s feet to the fire, leading the president to comment: “Wherever I go and whatever way I turn, they are on my tail.” Even after Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation in September of 1862, Thaddeus Stevens pushed for more. The Proclamation did not apply to all slaves, and it was a wartime measure that could be reversed when the war ended. It was Thaddeus Stevens who led the charge for a constitutional amendment to abolish slavery, which culminated in the passage of the 13th Amendment.
As early as 1862, Thaddeus called for permanent land redistribution as a way to create a solid economic foundation for former slaves, which he (and they) saw as a prerequisite for true freedom. Other measures such as General Sherman’s wartime order allowing slaves to settle on abandoned land did not grant them legal title to the land, and it was quickly stripped from them. Thaddeus Stevens instead proposed confiscating land from the wealthiest two percent of plantation owners, in order to provide forty acres to former slaves. He assured poor and middle-class Whites that their land would remain untouched, and argued that it made sense to redistribute wealthy plantation land because slaves had long worked that land with no compensation. His arguments, however, were deemed too radical even by many of his allies, who saw it as an unconstitutional assault on private property. The failure to provide former slaves with land quickly led to the rise of the neo-slavery systems of sharecropping and convict leasing.
When Thaddeus Stevens passed away in 1868, he had two Black preachers by his bedside, as well as Lydia Hamilton Smith… a Black woman he had lived with for twenty years and who was officially his “housekeeper,” although many suspected the relationship was more than that. For the following century, Thaddeus would live on as the arch-villain in the White southern imagination: Villains in Jim Crow stories and movies were often based on caricatures of the Radical Republican. The same qualities that made him a villain in the White South made him a hero to many Black Americans, who named schools, organizations and awards after him. Frederick Douglass even kept a portrait of Thaddeus Stevens hanging on his wall.
Quentin Young was a White doctor who used his medical expertise to support racial justice causes. Born to Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe in 1923, Quentin was deeply impacted as a child by witnessing the poverty of the Great Depression… not only in his hometown of Chicago, but especially in the rural areas where his grandparents lived in proximity to Black sharecroppers. Before pursuing medicine, his early moral impulses led him to consider becoming a rabbi. He dropped out of the University of Chicago when the United States joined World War II, for the explicit purpose of fighting fascism, and continued his studies when he returned from the war.
Quentin became deeply concerned by racial disparities in the medical field, as well as by White supremacist violence. In the 1950s he campaigned to desegregate Chicago’s hospitals. During the civil rights movement, he helped found the Medical Committee for Human Rights, which sent doctors to treat civil rights workers in the South… tending to freedom riders, victims of racist attacks during the violent Freedom Summer, and those who were beaten at Selma. When Martin Luther King led a campaign to challenge racialized poverty in Chicago, he was struck in the head by a large rock. Quentin Young, who had been marching beside King, was the doctor who treated him… and who continued to be his personal physician. During the 1968 Democratic National Convention, the Medical Committee for Human Rights treated Black Panthers who had battered by police during protests, as well as anti-Vietnam War protesters. Quentin also helped the Black Panthers and the Young Lords set up their community health clinics during that period. For such efforts, the notorious “red squad” of the Chicago police department – which surveilled and terrorized social justice workers – monitored Quentin closely. So did the FBI… for over 30 years.
Quentin Young continued to advocate for just, equal healthcare for decades. In the 1980s he became the nation’s leading voice for single-payer health care, arguing that it was no less feasible than Medicare and Social Security. Private health insurance companies, in his mind, were motivated by profits rather than healing, and perpetuated unequal and unjust healthcare. In the 1990s, Quentin met Barack Obama, and became his personal physician. He was greatly disappointed when Obama failed to pursue the single payer healthcare option. Quentin Young passed away in 2016.
Myles Horton was born in 1905, to loving, impoverished parents in Tennessee. His mother and father had both been educators, but when new teaching standards were passed that required teachers to have a high school education, they lost their jobs and became factory laborers. His parents, however, continued to organize classes for members of the community.
Myles left home at fifteen to work in a sawmill, and then as a packer in factories. There, he was exposed to unions, and became an organizer. He continued his labor organizing when he entered college in 1924. While in college, he also taught Bible classes. During one of the sessions, a group of rural workers told Myles about the difficulties they faced, and looked to him for answers. He had none, but asked the group to share more about their experiences. By creating a space for sharing, reflecting, and listening, the participants were able to discover their own solutions.
This was a moment that would shape the rest of Myles Horton’s life: by the late 1920s he was envisioning creating an educational space for the poor and working class people of Appalachia, geared towards helping communities wrestle with the problems that were the most important to them. This led him to travel to Denmark in 1931 and study the Danish folk schools, which were centered on the lived experiences and concerns of students. Myles’ thinking was influenced by these school’s informality, focus on community problem solving, and culture building.
In 1932, Myles Horton rented a small farm in the Appalachian Mountains, where he co-founded the Highlander Folk School. Poor and working class Southerners would attend workshops and discussion groups, with the purpose of sharing their own experiences and ideas with one another and generating solutions. They were then encouraged to go back to their communities and put those solutions into practice… and perhaps return to Highlander for further rounds of reflection and refinement in their search for solutions to the problems they cared about. Highlander soon became a center for labor organizing… and for combatting the racism that divided working-class people from mobilizing and working together.
In 1944, Highlander hosted its first integrated workshops. As momentum for the civil rights movement picked up in the early 1950s, Highlander shifted to become a civil rights training ground. Rosa Parks attended sessions before the Montgomery bus boycott, and after the boycott, Martin Luther King began using Highlander as a retreat and training ground for his organization. Most importantly, the ethos of Highlander had a huge impact on the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee: influenced by trainings at Highlander, SNCC members organized Black communities throughout the South not by telling people how to organize… but through deep listening and sharing, through which communities were able to organize themselves and develop local, sustainable leadership and movement community.
Myles Horton continued to direct Highlander until 1973. Highlander remains a vital organizing center to this day.