Viola Gregg Liuzzo
A housewife who answered MLK's call. After watching news footage of white policemen beating and tear-gassing protestors for Black voting rights in Selma, Viola Gregg Liuzzo — a Detroit housewife and mother of five — decided to join the fight. In March 1965, she drove down to Alabama to serve as a carpooler for a Martin Luther King Jr.-led march.Just days after her arrival, Liuzzo was driving a 19-year-old Black man, Leroy Moton, home when three Ku Klux Klan members and a man who was later identified as an FBI informant shot her to death. President Lyndon Johnson, King, and prominent labor leaders condemned Liuzzo’s murder, but the recognition didn’t keep her family from being harassed. White supremacists burned a cross in front of her Detroit home, and the FBI made up rumors about her sleeping with Black men and doing drugs. Her husband had to hire armed guards, and in a Ladies' Home Journal survey, 55% of readers branded Liuzzo an irresponsible mother.Still, the sacrifice of Violet Liuzzo — a white female martyr of the Civil Rights Movement — is cited as one reason Congress passed the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965. Today, Liuzzo is listed on the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery
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| a powerful woman - Viola Gregg Liuzzo, who answered Dr. King's call & paid with her life |
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