Liuzzo, Viola (1925–1965)

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Liuzzo, Viola (1925–1965)

American civil-rights activist, gunned down by the KKK, who was the only woman killed while participating in the civil-rights movement. Born Viola Gregg in Tennessee in 1925; murdered in Alabama, on March 25, 1965; married Anthony Liuzzo (a Teamster official); children: Penny Liuzzo; Mary Liuzzo; Thomas Liuzzo; Anthony Liuzzo, Jr.; Sally Liuzzo.

Many would argue that injustice against Viola Liuzzo, a white mother of five who was chased down by a car full of KKK members and murdered, did not end with her death. Following a brief moment of martyrdom, attacks against her character began to cloud the memory of this civil-rights activist who paid for a belief in equality with blood. In his review of Mary Stanton 's 1998 biography of Liuzzo, From Selma to Sorrow, Steve Watkins writes that the stories about her included accusations that the married Liuzzo was sexually involved with the black man who narrowly escaped being murdered at her side, "that she had abandoned her family, that she had a drug problem, that she had been institutionalized for emotional problems, that her husband had mob connections." In her biography, Stanton theorizes that accusations against Liuzzo were trumped up as a smoke screen to cover up a government conspiracy in the case. Although her hypothesis has yet to be proven, it has been regarded by some as more than plausible. Watkins comments: "Some of the stories came from the Klan, some from the local Alabama police…. But many of the stories, which had scant basis in fact, came from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, on orders from the FBI director, J. Edgar Hoover. The reason: an FBI informant had been riding with the Klansmen who murdered Liuzzo; he may even have been the one who shot her."

Among the irrefutable facts are Liuzzo's dedication as a civil-rights worker (she was one of the few whites of her time to join the NAACP); that she drove to Montgomery, Alabama, on the evening of March 24, 1965, and joined the last leg of the second Selma-Montgomery march organized by Martin Luther King, Jr.; and that she was gunned down by Klansmen while driving on March 25 with a black teenager, Leroy Moton, to pick up a group of marchers.

Born in Tennessee in 1925, Liuzzo was married with five children by the age of 36. Returning to school en route to becoming a lab technician, she graduated with top honors. Editor Sara Bullard notes that following a few months of work, Liuzzo protested the treatment of female secretaries by quitting her job.

Like the rest of the country, Liuzzo heard the reports of the brutal attack by Alabama state troopers against marchers for black voting rights outside Selma on March 7, 1965. Organized by Martin Luther King with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the march had been scheduled to proceed down Route 80 from Selma to the Alabama capital of Montgomery. Governor George Wallace, who had banned the march, had the troopers stand shoulder to shoulder across the highway to block the route. The shouted command "troopers advance" sent them charging into the crowd, beating marchers with wooden billy clubs. Additional marchers who attempted to aid those who could not escape were sprayed with tear gas. A sheriff's posse on horseback joined in the attack, using rope, bullwhips, and rubber tubing wrapped with barbed wire. This display of violence on Highway 80, clearly showing peaceful black marchers being assaulted by the police, was captured on network television. Stunned Americans watched images of "Bloody Sunday."

"We have witnessed an eruption of the disease of racism which seeks to destroy all America," wrote King in telegrams to prominent clerics. "No American is without responsibility. The people of Selma will struggle on for the soul of the nation but it is fitting that all Americans help to bear the burden. I call therefore, on the clergy of all faiths, to join me in Selma." The court order which King and the SCLC won directed the state to protect those who would participate in the second scheduled march from Selma to Montgomery, beginning on March 21. The order specified that the march be limited to 300 people and be contained within a two-lane section of Highway 80. The White House was informed by Governor Wallace that Alabama did not have the money to cover the cost of mobilizing the National Guard. This gave President Lyndon B. Johnson the opportunity he needed to protect the march: Johnson authorized the use of 200 FBI agents and U.S. marshals in addition to 2,000 regular army troops, and he federalized 1,900 of Alabama's National Guard.

Liuzzo heeded King's call and traveled from her Michigan home to Selma, a three-day journey by car. In Selma, she spent the week before the march serving at the hospitality desk located in Brown Chapel. With her green Oldsmobile, she shuttled people to and from the Montgomery airport. The march began on March 21. Three days later, on March 24, the procession arrived in Montgomery. In his book Selma 1965, Charles E. Fager described the scene as the marchers neared Montgomery: "[T]he road widened, ending the 300 limitation and all through the afternoon cars and buses stopped along the line and discharged new marchers. There were thousands of them, exuberant and noisy, carrying banners and placards…. When they arrived at the final campsite, the march was like a tide coming in, inevitable and relentless, inundating everything." In addition to King, Rosa Parks , John Lewis, Roy Wilkins, and Whitney Young were some of the important civil-rights leaders who attended.

On the evening of March 24, Liuzzo drove to Montgomery, where she assisted in the first-aid station. She said to Father Tim Deasy, with whom she had climbed a tower to watch the march: "Something is going to happen today, I feel it. Somebody is going to get killed," a premonition she also mentioned to others. When King made an attempt to take a petition for full voting rights to Governor Wallace, troopers prevented him from entering the Capitol building. Instead, the petition was received, outside, by Wallace's secretary.

The march's end left thousands in need of transportation out of the city. According to Kay Houston of The Detroit News, Liuzzo took a load of passengers in her car back to Selma. When her Oldsmobile, conspicuous with its Michigan plates, was bumped several times from behind by a car full of whites, she remarked to Leroy Moton, who'd helped her with the driving, that she thought these local whites "were crazy." After they delivered their group to Brown Chapel in Selma, the two were on their way back to Montgomery to pick up another load of passengers when they stopped at a traffic light. A car carrying four KKK members from the steel town of Bessemer, near Birmingham, pulled up beside them. In the car were Collie Leroy Wilkins, Eugene Thomas, William Orville Eaton, and Gary Thomas Rowe, whose identity as a paid FBI informant was not then known. Upon seeing the white woman and the black teenager together in the car, Wilkins reportedly remarked to Rowe, "I'll be damned. Look there." Driver Eugene Thomas replied, "Let's get them."

The light changed, and the Klan members chased the Oldsmobile at nearly 100 mph despite what Rowe later claimed were his pleas for his companions to call off the pursuit. As they closed in on Liuzzo and Moton, the four Klansmen each armed themselves. They pulled up to the Oldsmobile and, as Liuzzo looked at their car, fired, shooting her twice in the head and speeding away. Rowe would later claim that he had only pretended to fire his gun.

Liuzzo died instantly and fell against the wheel. Moton, bloodied, tried to take control of the car which finally stopped against an embankment. It was then that he discovered that Liuzzo was dead. He saw the Klan car approaching and feigned death while the killers shined a light into the car. When they were gone, Moton ran until he was picked up by a truck carrying marchers. He passed out after telling them what had happened. "Within 24 hours, President Johnson was on television," writes Houston, "personally announcing the arrest of the four assailants and vowing to exterminate the KKK." Said Johnson: "Mrs. Liuzzo went to Alabama to serve the struggle for justice. She was murdered by the enemies of justice who for decades have used the rope and the gun and the tar and the feather to terrorize their neighbors."

Bullard notes that after the murder Liuzzo's family was "besieged with hate mail and phone calls. The Klan circulated ugly lies about [Viola's] character, and these were repeated in FBI reports."

None of the assailants were convicted for murder in the Alabama court: Eugene Thomas was tried for murder (September 1966) and acquitted; Wilkins was tried twice for murder (May and October, 1965) and was twice acquitted; William Eaton died in 1966 of a heart attack; Gary Rowe was tried twice for murder, once resulting in a hung jury, then in an acquittal.

In federal courts, all except Rowe were charged with conspiring to deprive Liuzzo of her civil rights (December 1965). Called a traitor by a lawyer for the KKK, Rowe testified against the others who on December 3 were convicted. Each of the three received the maximum sentence, ten years in prison.

According to political columnist Jack Lessenberry of the Detroit Metro Times, it would be years before Liuzzo's children learned that two of the KKK members testified (and took lie-detector tests, with an expert declaring they were being truthful) that Rowe was actually the shooter who had murdered their mother. Lessenberry reports that although he denied those accusations, Rowe said on ABC-TV that he had beaten up other civil-rights demonstrators, bragging, "I was a hell of a man back then." In 1980, a Justice Department investigation admitted to the FBI's knowledge and cover-up of Rowe's involvement in non-deadly attacks on blacks. By his own admittance, in 1961 Rowe participated in the violent attack on Freedom Riders at a Birmingham bus station during which—in an arrangement made with Birmingham police—KKK members were allowed 15 minutes to beat up civil-rights activists with impunity. Also according to Rowe, in 1963 he was responsible for the shooting death of an unidentified black man during a Birmingham riot, a killing about which Rowe claimed he was instructed by federal authorities to remain silent.

Coming on the heels of Bloody Sunday, Liuzzo's death had an intense effect on public opinion, despite the character assassination which followed her murder. Many have regarded her death as the final provocation that resulted in Congress passing the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which gave hundreds of thousands of blacks the right to vote, five months later. "Within a few years," writes Lessenberry, "even George Wallace would be courting black votes."

Liuzzo is the only white woman named on the Civil Rights Memorial located three blocks from the Capitol in Montgomery, but she has been largely forgotten. It could be argued that this has been a result of the rumors, whatever their origins, which ascribed to her a questionable nature as a woman, as a wife, and as a mother. Writes Mary Stanton, "The media took only days to completely transform Viola Liuzzo from a murder victim to an outside agitator and a symbol of reckless female defiance." In a May 1999 interview with Times-Warner Bookmark, author Octavia Butler recalled reading letters in a women's magazine, subsequent to Liuzzo's murder, which declared that Liuzzo had no right to deprive her family by engaging in activities which led to her death. Butler recalled the way that the civil-rights worker, rather than her murderers, was condemned, particularly because of what was expected of her as a woman.

In 1966, Gary Rowe entered the federal witness protection program. He lived at least the last two decades of his life in Savannah, Georgia, and died in 1998. Although he used the alias Thomas Neil Moore, he did on occasion disclose his true identity. Writes Bob Sechler of the Savannah Morning News: "[D]espite the one-time high-profile, Rowe was buried June 2 with little notice from the Klan or anyone else. He was bankrupt at the time of his May 25 death from a heart attack—with debts totaling about $60,000—and only a handful of FBI agents, estranged family members and some friends, including Liakakis [his friend and employer], attended the funeral." Said Liakakis, who called Rowe by the alias despite his knowledge of his friend's true identity: "Tom was mostly a loner the last couple of years, but he was a really good guy."

In a civil claim filed by the Liuzzo family against the FBI in October 1977, it was charged that FBI employee Rowe had failed to prevent the death of Viola Liuzzo and that he may have taken part in her death. The suit was rejected in May 1983 by a judge who maintained that there was "no evidence the FBI was in any type of joint venture with Rowe or conspiracy against Mrs. Liuzzo. Rowe's presence in the car was the principal reason why the crime was solved so quickly."

To help ensure that Liuzzo's memory will be kept alive, her son Tony and his wife Sue Liuzzo established the Viola Gregg Liuzzo Institute for Human Rights/Assuring Human Dignity. Houston reports that after Liuzzo's death her husband Anthony spoke with President Johnson. "I don't think she died in vain because this is going to be a battle, all out as far as I'm concerned…. My wife died for a sacred battle, the rights of humanity. She had one concern and only one in mind. She took a quote from Abraham Lincoln that all men are created equal and that's the way she believed."