Reflection on Viola Liuzzo

Shared by Marlene Koenig at Midweek Lenten Holden Evening Prayer as part of our series on reflections on Civil Rights leaders.

 

It’s Everybody’s Fight

 

Growing up in Chattanooga, Tennessee, Viola Liuzzo was acutely aware, even as a child, that her dirt poor family had more privileges than local black families, although they shared the same income inequity.  This realization would come to fruition in the early 1960s, when she was living a comfortable life with her second husband, Teamsters official Anthony James Liuzzo, and their five children (two were from her first marriage) that belied her desire to help others.

In December 2017, Donna Britt wrote a profile of Viola – her childhood hero – for the Washington Post.   Viola was a white mom who went to Alabama to fight for civil rights.   She was killed by the Ku Klux Klan.

Viola was 39 years old when she was killed.  She was cute, as Donna Britt wrote in her profile.  She was a mom who willingly put herself into a dangerous position by traveling to Alabama to march with Martin Luther King Jr., in Selma in March 1965.  For Donna Britt, an African-American journalist, learning about a white woman, who left her home to fight for people she didn’t know – this was an awakening –  she realized that the “monsters” — the racists could attack anyone.

Viola is not the best known of civil rights activists.  But she was “everything you’d want in a mom – and hero – to be,” said one of her daughters, Mary, who was a tenth grader when Viola was killed.  Penny, her eldest daughter, said her mother was not a martyr but a “wonderful human being who loved every living creature.”

Viola could not tolerate any suffering – in anyone – white or black.  She enrolled in a nursing course, where she became acutely aware of the disparity between her life – and the lives of African-Americans she did not know.

Her daughters remember Viola posing questions to them: during a visit to a department store at Christmas, she asked them how they would feel if every Santa was black and not white.  What if the magazines her daughters loved “never put pretty white girls on their covers.”   Mary told Britt that her mom’s questions offered a “glimpse into a world totally different than the one I was living in.”

Viola raised her children with an outward look on life.  She took them to museums and planetariums.  She insisted that they watch their dog give birth – she wanted them to have an appreciation of the natural world.

And then there was the discussion she had with her husband, Jim, who told her that civil rights was not her fight.  She told him: “it’s everybody’s fight.”

Her views were largely formed by her observations of segregation.  In 1941, her parents moved to Ypsilanti, Michigan, where her father found employment assembling bombs.  Viola, a bit of a rebel, defied her parents by dropping out of high school when she was 16 and ran off and got married.  The marriage lasted for about a day.  Viola returned home.

During the 1940s, Detroit was a city wracked by violence and segregation. In the first hand witnessing of the racial turmoil during this time, Viola saw that there was a need for change.  How that change would come was not yet known?

She got married again – this one ended after only six years and two children.  In 1950, she married Jim Liuzzo in 1950.  They would have three children.

It was her friendship with Sara Evans, a black woman, that led Viola to joining the NAACP.  Viola and Sara were besties. Viola asked Sara to look after her kids if anything happened to her … can you imagine, a white woman saying this to a black woman, treating her as an equal, to care for her children.

She regretted dropping out of high school and protested Detroit’s law that allowed students to easily drop out of school by withdrawing her children for two months, choosing to home school them.  She was arrested for her actions, pleaded guilty and was placed on probation.

Faith played an important role in Viola’s life.  She was unchurched as a child but became a Roman Catholic when she married Jim Liuzzo.   She was devout until she gave birth to a stillborn child.   Her church would not bury her child because it had not been baptized.   She left the Catholic church because of this.   She did not turn away from God.  Viola realized that God’s love was far deeper – and this realization led Viola to dig deeper into her own faith.   She turned, briefly, to Protestant evangelicalism, before discovering the Unitarian Universalist Church, where she found  a faith community that shared her vision of a God “active in the events of human history.”

Viola became a full member of the Unitarian church in March 1964.

She knew a wrong when she saw it.  Her daughter, Mary, wondered if Viola was born with such empathy.  One year, when a neighbor’s house burned down on Christmas Eve, she “pounded on the door” of the home of a local toy store owner, demanding that he open his store so she could by presents for the homeless family.

In February 1965, following a night demonstration for voting rights at the Marion, Alabama, courthouse, the violence began.  State troopers beat and clubbed marchers and shot and killed a 26-year-old black man, Jimmy Lee Jackson.  In response, another march was called by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference for March 7.  The march took place despite a ban ordered by Governor George Wallace.  As the marchers approached the middle of the Edmund Pettus bridge, they noticed a phalanx of State troopers armed with whips, clubs and tear gas.  The police ordered the protestors to disperse, but they refused.   The state police began clubbing and whipping the protestors.

From her home in Detroit, Viola watched in horror the coverage on television.  A few days later she took part in a protest at Wayne State University, where she had been a student, and then she heard the call from Martin Luther King Jr., calling for people of all faiths, to come to Alabama to march.   She called her husband to tell her plans and enlisted the help of Sara, to look after the kids.

Viola promised her children that she would call them every night.  Sara told her with prescience that she could be killed.    Viola probably brushed off her friend’s fear.  “I want to be a part of it.”

Viola got into her 1963 Oldsmobile and drove to Alabama. It took three days to drive to Selma.  She went straight to the Southern Christian Leadership conference to volunteer.  She helped at the hospitality desk, welcoming and registering others who came to help.   She joined 3000 marchers going across the Edmund Pettus bridge, and marched toward Montgomery.   For the next few days, she volunteered at the registration desk and also provided a shuttle service between the airport and the marchers’ campsite.

On the night March 24, Viola stayed at a local Catholic church, where she went up to the church tower to watch 25,000 marchers approach the town.  She came down from the tower, “unsettled and anxious,” telling one of the priests “Father, I have a feeling of apprehension. Something is going to happen today.  Someone is going to be killed.”

She prayed, which brought back a sense of calm before going to sleep.  The following day, March 25, 1965, she joined the march, walking barefoot for the final four miles to the capital building, singing freedom songs.  She hated wearing shoes.

After the march was over, she met with Leroy Moton a civil rights worker, who had been using her car as an airport shuttle.  After dropping off five passengers at the airport, Viola said she would drive Leroy back to Montgomery.

The harassment began within minutes after leaving the airport. One car with several white people inside tried to bump Vi’s Oldsmobile several times.  Another driver turned on the high beams to stare down Viola.  She did not give in.  She slowed down to let the other car pass.  She told Leroy: “Two can play at this game.”

It is difficult for me to fathom, even understand, the actions of others that led to Viola’s death.  She stopped at a gas station where white bystanders shouted hateful epithets at her.

Driving down the local highway, Viola began to sing “And long before I’ll be a slave I’ll be buried in my grave and go home to my Lord and be free.”

Another car on that road carried four members of the KKK – one was an FBI informer.  They had spotted Viola and Leroy at a traffic light and then followed them for more than 20 miles.  She broke into song again, singing “We shall Overcome” at the top of her lungs.

The car pulled up next to Viola’s car and started shooting.   Viola was shot in head and was killed instantly. Leroy Moton, who was only 19, threw himself on Viola, but escaped injury.

President Johnson called Jim Liuzzo the following day, telling him “I don’t think she died in vain because this is going to be a battle, all out as far as I am concerned.”

Jim said to the president “My wife died for a sacred battle, the rights for 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.”

There would be memorial services in Alabama and in Detroit for Viola.  The latter was hosted by the NAACP and one of the honored guests was Rosa Parks.    A televised high requiem mass at a Roman Catholic church was celebrated on March 30 and it was attended by a number of civil rights leader including Dr. King.

Many historians believe that the speed by which Congress passed the Voting Rights Act on April 6, 1965 had more to do with the national outrage about the murder of a white woman and less  to do, according to Donna Britt’s profile, “another dispensable Negro.”

In an interview with CBS News in 2015, Leroy Moton agreed with the historians.  The death of a white mom pushed forward the legislative process.

Viola’s death certainly did not quiet the haters.   Not everyone thought she was a hero.  A cross was burned on her family’s lawn.   When one of her daughters returned her school, the street was lined with adults shouting at the young girl, throwing rocks at her and calling her a “N lover’s baby.”

And then the rumors started.  Viola was a Communist.  Viola drove to Alabama to have sex with black men. She was a drug addict.   None were true.

The four men were arrested, but none were charged with murder, not surprising, as the jury was all white and all men.  The FBI informant – of course – received immunity, and later placed in the witness protection program.  The others were sentenced for ten years – for violating Liuzzo’s civil rights.

“The battle isn’t over, it’s never over,” Leroy said in his testimony at the trial.

It took years for Viola’s family to have her FBI files opened.  Only then did they learn that all the rumors about their mom had come from one person: J Edgar Hoover, the head of the FBI, who ordered the smear campaign against Viola, for no other reason to than to deflect attention from the agency.

Sometime before her death, Viola wrote in her journal “I can’t sit back and watch my people suffer.”

Donna Britt noted that she could not help but marvel at “people with no discernable dog in  a fight who jumps in with both feet.  It’s too easy, shrugging, ‘Not my fight.’”

I leave you with words from her daughter Mary speaking about her mother.  “She actually believed it when Christ said that the suffering and needy are our people.  Mom saw all other human beings as her people.”

It’s everybody’s fight.