Viola Liuzzo
Viola Fauver Liuzzo was an American civil rights activist in Detroit, Michigan. She went to Alabama in March 1965 to support the Selma to Montgomery march for voting rights. On March 25, 1965, she was shot dead by three Klan members while driving activists between the cities and transportation.
Also in the pursuit car was an undercover informant working for the Federal Bureau of Investigation. His role in this and other events was not revealed until 1978. To deflect attention from the FBI, its head J. Edgar Hoover made defamatory claims about Liuzzo.
Three of the men were charged with murder by the state, but not convicted. The federal government charged the three KKK members with conspiracy to intimidate African Americans under the 1871 Ku Klux Klan Act, a Reconstruction era civil rights statute. On December 3, the trio was found guilty by an all-white, all-male jury, a landmark in Southern legal history. They were sentenced to ten years in prison.
As the FBI informant testified in court, Gary Rowe was put in the witness protection program for his safety. He lived until 1998.
In 1983, after learning about the FBI's activities related to the Liuzzo case, her family filed a lawsuit against the FBI for not preventing her death and for damages because of false accusations. The court dismissed the lawsuit.
Viola Liuzzo was given many honors posthumously; her name was inscribed on the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama. Her grandson set up a scholarship in her honor.
Early life and education
Viola Fauver Gregg was born on April 11, 1925, in the small town of California, Pennsylvania, the elder daughter of Eva Wilson, a teacher, and Heber Ernest Gregg, a coal miner and World War I veteran. Her father had taught himself to read as a child and left school in the eighth grade. Her mother had a teaching certificate from Southwestern Pennsylvania Normal School. The couple had a second daughter, Rose Mary, in 1930.Heber lost his right hand in a mine explosion when they were living in Georgia. It was during the Great Depression, and the Greggs became solely dependent on Eva's income. She had difficulty finding anything other than short-term teaching positions. Struggling with poverty, when Viola was six the family decided to move from Georgia to Chattanooga, Tennessee, where Eva found a teaching position.
The family was very poor and lived in one-room shacks with no running water. The schools Liuzzo attended did not have adequate supplies, and teachers had little time to deal with the many children in need. Because the family moved so often, Liuzzo usually began and ended the year in different schools. Having been poor in Tennessee for much of her childhood and adolescence, she was close to the racially segregated nature of the South. This would have a powerful influence on her activism.
Michigan
In 1941, the Gregg family moved to Ypsilanti, Michigan, where her father sought work to assemble bombs at the Ford Motor Co. Viola dropped out of high school after a year and eloped at the age of 16. Her marriage did not last, and she returned to her family.Two years later, the Gregg family moved to Detroit, Michigan, which was segregated by race. Tensions between whites and blacks were very high as they competed for jobs and housing in a city with many new residents, including immigrants. In the early 1940s there was violence and rioting between ethnic groups. Viola Gregg witnessed some of these, which influenced her later civil rights work.
Marriage and family
In 1943, she married George Argyris, the manager of a restaurant where she worked. They had two children, Penny and Evangeline Mary. They divorced in 1949.Two years later, Gregg married Anthony Liuzzo, a Teamsters union business agent. They had three children together: Tommy, Anthony Jr., and Sally. They also raised her first two daughters.
Liuzzo wanted to gain more education and trained to become a medical laboratory assistant at the Carnegie Institute in Detroit, Michigan. In 1962 she enrolled part-time at Wayne State University to continue her education.
In 1964, she began attending the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Detroit and joined the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
A large part of Liuzzo's activism, particularly with the NAACP, developed from her close friendship with Sarah Evans, an African-American woman. They had met at a grocery store where Liuzzo worked as a cashier, and kept in touch. Liuzzo hired Evans to help with her child care. After taking on more, she promoted Evans to her fulltime nanny and housekeeper. The two women had both grown up in the South, and found they had similar views on some issues, including support for the civil rights movement. After Liuzzo's death, Evans became the permanent caretaker of her friend's five young children.
Local activism
Liuzzo protested against Detroit's laws that allowed students to drop out of school more easily. Instead, she wanted families to be helped to get their children educated. She temporarily withdrew her own children from public school to express her opposition to the law. Because she publicly home-schooled them for two months, Liuzzo was arrested. She pleaded guilty in court and was placed on probation.Selma, Alabama
In the early 1960s, activism increased in the South, especially for voting rights. In February 1965, a night demonstration for voting rights at the Marion, Alabama, courthouse turned violent. State troopers clubbed marchers; they beat and fatally shot Jimmie Lee Jackson, a 26-year-old African-American man. His death spurred the fight for civil rights in nearby Selma, the larger county seat of Dallas County.Organizers had asked for help from Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., who had been active in efforts to desegregate Birmingham, Alabama. He led the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, whose members planned a protest march for Sunday, March 7, 1965. Gov. George Wallace banned the march, but activists ignored his ban.
Six hundred unarmed marchers headed for the Edmund Pettus Bridge to cross the Alabama River and go to the state capital were clubbed and whipped by state troopers, fracturing bones and gashing heads. Seventeen people were hospitalized on the day later called "Bloody Sunday".
Like many observers, Liuzzo was horrified by the images broadcast and published by national media. A second march took place March 9. Troopers, police, and marchers confronted each other at the county end of the bridge, but when the troopers stepped aside to let them pass, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. led the marchers back to Brown Church, which was the base.
That night, a white group beat and murdered civil rights activist James Reeb, a Unitarian Universalist minister from Boston, who had come to Selma for the second march. Many other clergy and sympathizers from across the country had also gathered for the second march.
On March 16, Liuzzo took part in a protest at Wayne State. She decided to do more. She called her husband to tell him she would be traveling to Selma to respond to Rev. King's call for people of all faiths to come, saying that the struggle "was everybody's fight." Leaving her children in the care of family and friends, she drove to Selma.
There she contacted the SCLC and was put to work delivering aid, welcoming and recruiting volunteers, and transporting volunteers and marchers to and from airports, bus terminals, and train stations. She volunteered the use of her car, a 1963 Oldsmobile.
On March 21, 1965, more than 3,000 people began the third march. They were blacks, whites, working-class people, doctors, nurses, priests, nuns, rabbis, homemakers, students, actors, and farmers. Many notable civil rights leaders participated, including Martin Luther King Jr., and his wife Coretta Scott King, Ralph Abernathy, Ralph Bunche, and Andrew Young. It took five days for the protesters to reach their goal of Montgomery, the state capital. Along the way, other protesters joined and by the last day, some 25,000 marchers entered Montgomery. The event received widespread media coverage.
Liuzzo marched the first full day and returned to Selma for the night. On Wednesday, March 24, she rejoined the march four miles from the end. A celebration took place that night with national entertainers. Liuzzo helped at the first aid station. On Thursday, Liuzzo and other marchers reached the state capitol building, which still flew a Confederate flag together with the state flag. Rev. King Jr. addressed the crowd of 25,000, calling the march a "shining moment in American history."
Assassination
After the march, Liuzzo, assisted by Leroy Moton, a 19-year-old African American, continued shuttling marchers and volunteers from Montgomery back to Selma in her car. James Orange, an SCLC veteran, warned her that it was very dangerous and she should not drive to Montgomery.As Liuzzo and Moton were driving along Route 80 to Selma, a car tried to force them off the road. After dropping passengers off, she and Moton headed back to Montgomery. While getting gas at a local filling station, they were subject to abusive, racist comments by other customers.
Liuzzo was stopped at a red light when a car with four white men pulled up alongside. When they saw the white woman and black man together, they followed Liuzzo as she tried to outrun them. They overtook the Oldsmobile and shot directly at Liuzzo, mortally wounding her twice in the head. The car veered into a ditch, crashing into a fence. The men were found to be members of the local Ku Klux Klan, including Gary Thomas Rowe, an FBI informant.
The bullets missed Moton, but he was covered with Liuzzo's blood. He lay motionless as the Klansmen checked their victims. After they left, Moton sought help. He flagged down a truck driven by Rev. Leon Riley, who had also been shuttling civil rights workers to Selma.