Viola Liuzzo and the Road Back to Selma

Viola Liuzzo was a thirty-nine-year-old mother of five from Detroit. She was white. She drove to Alabama in March nineteen sixty-five after watching television coverage of the Bloody Sunday attack and deciding she had to help.

On the night of March twenty-fifth, nineteen sixty-five, the same day the marchers reached Montgomery, Liuzzo was driving demonstrators back along Highway Eighty toward Selma. Her passenger was Leroy Moton, a nineteen-year-old Black activist. A car carrying four Ku Klux Klan members pulled alongside them. They shot Liuzzo in the head. She died immediately. The car ran off the road. Moton pretended to be dead until the Klan car left.

One of the four men in that car was Gary Thomas Rowe, an FBI informant who had been reporting on Klan activities to the bureau for years. His role was not publicly revealed until nineteen seventy-eight, when Liuzzo's children obtained FBI documents through the Freedom of Information Act. The documents showed the FBI had used Rowe in operations that had placed him inside violent attacks, and that the bureau under J. Edgar Hoover had subsequently launched a smear campaign against Liuzzo herself, leaking false and defamatory claims about her to deflect attention.

Three of the four Klansmen were tried for murder by the state and not convicted by Alabama juries. They were then tried in federal court under the Reconstruction-era Ku Klux Klan Act of eighteen seventy-one, charged with conspiracy to deprive citizens of their civil rights. On December third, nineteen sixty-five, all three were convicted, a landmark verdict in Southern legal history.

Viola Liuzzo's name is inscribed on the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, designed by Maya Lin. Moton is still living.