Viola Liuzzo was described by her
husband as someone “who fought for everyone’s rights. She was a champion for
the underdog.” Liuzzo had come to Selma to help marchers in any way she could.
She had told her husband, “its everyone’s fight,” the evening she left to drive
to Alabama to help protesters in the Selma to Montogomery March.
Liuzzo grew up in segregated Tennessee, and this formed her views on civil rights. An active member of the
Detroit chapter of the NAACP, she was familiar with organized protests and the
problems in Alabama. She had left Detroit after witnessing the events of “Bloody
Sunday,” on March 7th, when police and vigilantes attacked Black
marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge to stop them from marching to Montogomery to
protest their inability to vote due to poll taxes and poll tests.
On March 25th, the protest
had climaxed, and demonstrators were breaking up in too small groups and
looking for ways home. Liuzzo agreed to shuttle people back to Selma and was
riding with a young Black man, 19-year-old Leroy Moton. He had agreed to help
drive if she needed it. After dropping some people in Selma Liuzzo and Moton
were headed back to Montgomery on State Highway 80 when they picked up a tail.
Earlier in the day, Ku Klux Klan
members had gathered at Silver Moon Café. They had been keeping the protest under
surveillance under orders from their Klavern in Birmingham. When they left
Selma to head back to Montgomery, they saw Liuzzo’s green Oldsmobile. The car
had Michigan plates, and Moton was sitting in the front seat with Liuzzo. This triggered
them because it was everything they hated about the civil rights movement,
outsiders, and race mixing. So, they followed. Moton said that Liuzzo was
singing “WE Shall Overcome” when the car caught them, even though they were
going down the two-lane road at nearly 100 miles an hour. Even at the speed, the
Klansmen pulled alongside and shot into the car, instantly killing Liuzzo, the
car wrecked knocking Moton out. When he woke up, he flagged down a passing
truck and notified the authorities in Selma.
Within 24 hours, President Lyndon
Johnson had appeared on television to report the arrest of three Klan members
for Liuzzo’s murder. Eugene Thomas, Collie Leroy Wilkins, Jr., and William
Orville Eaton had all been arrested. A fourth man, Gary Rowe, had not been since
he was an FBI informant.
Rowe went on to testify against
the men in three trials. Although he had been recruited to infiltrate the Klan
in 1959, he was also being recruited by the Klan, in his time as an informant
Rowe hade been under superstition many times including for providing the
dynamite or even that he built the bombs that killed four little girls in the
1963 the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham. Rowe, though, was protected by the FBI on orders from director J. Edgar Hoover. Hoover
took the civil rights movement and protests personally and felt certain that Dr.
Martin Luther King Jr. was a communist agent trained to disrupt America. Hoover
was concerned that the high-profile murder could lead the press to find out
about Rowe, and that would make the FBI culpable in not just the murder of Liuzzo
but other activities.
Liuzzo’s body was flown back to
Detroit on the private plane of Teamster’s president, Jimmy Hoffa, and met by her
family. Liuzzo’s husband was a business manager for the Teamsters in Detroit at
the time of the murder. The funeral was held on March 30th at the
Immaculate Heart of Mary Catholic Church in Detroit. It was attended by
Dr. King, future congressman John Lewis, and NAACP executive director Roy
Wilkins. Also, by Michigan Lt. Governor William G. Milliken. Hoffa and United
Auto Workers Union President Walter Reuther.
Despite the high-profile
individuals at the funeral or perhaps because of it, crosses were burned the
next night in Detroit, including on the Liuzzo’s lawn. For at least the next
two years, the family had security at their home both extended police presence
and private security. Despite this, the Liuzzo children were bullied and
taunted at school.
This was made worse as trial preparations
began, and the Klan, the lawyer for the three accused men, and the FBI all seemed
to work in tandem to smear Liuzzo’s reputation. Rumors and stories were spread
that Mrs. Liuzzo had been a heroin user and had abandoned her family to have
sexual relations with Black men.
At the state trials, these rumors
and the bias present in the jury resulted in a hung jury in the accused's first
trial after just 6 hours. A second trial led to a verdict of innocent by an all-White
male jury. If left at that level, there would be no justice. Fortunately, President
Johnson’s Department of Justice decided to bring federal charges against the
three Klan members for conspiring to violate the civil rights of Mrs. Liuzzo.
They were convicted and each sentenced to 10 years in prison.
The murder of Viola Liuzzo became
a transcendent moment in the Civil Rights cause. She became a martyr for the movement,
and it was her murder that led Johnson to declare war on the Klan and bring
Hoover to heel by ordering the director to engage in enforcing the Civil Rights
Act. It is also believed by most historians that Liuzzo’s murder was the push
to get the Civil Rights Act passed.
In the aftermath of the murder Leroy
Moton became an agitator and hard worker for the NAACP and Southern Christian
Leadership Council to help to register voters in Illinois, Michigan, and
Georgia. In interviews, he said that for years he had guilt and wondered why he survived
when a mother of 5 didn’t. He died quietly at age 78 in 2023 at his son’s home
in Hartford, Connecticut.
Rowe would become a highly
controversial figure for the rest of his life. He was subpoenaed to appear before a
Congressional Committee. He was prepared to make the FBI the wrongdoers in his
life and testified that they never attempted to stop his violence against
Blacks. He received immunity and went into the witness protection program even
though he acknowledged attacking freedom riders and killing a Black man. He
wrote a book about his time undercover that was turned into a TV Movie in 1979.
The Liuzzo family sued the FBI
for the death of Liuzzo and associated damages. On May 27, 1983, Judge Charles
Wycliffe Joiner rejected the claims, saying there was "no evidence
the FBI was in any type of joint venture with Rowe or conspiracy against Mrs.
Liuzzo.”
In the decades since Mary Liuzzo
Lilleboe, her brother Anthony and sister Sally have taken every opportunity to
tell the world of the heroism and compassion of their mother, as well as the
pain experienced by their family following her death and the subsequent smear
campaign against her character. They have dedicated their lives to destroying
the image Hoover had tried to create.
 |
| Leroy Moton in 1965 and 2023 |
Sources:
https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1965/03/27/101535542.pdf?pdf_redirect=true&ip=0
https://www.wvtm13.com/article/alabama-montgomery-selma-viola-liuzzo-kkk-civil-rights/63907002
https://detroithistorical.org/learn/encyclopedia-of-detroit/liuzzo-viola-0
https://www.learningforjustice.org/classroom-resources/texts/viola-liuzzo
https://www.montgomeryadvertiser.com/story/news/local/selma50/2015/03/08/liuzzos-children-know-played-pivotal-role/24631939/
