Killed by KKK and Smeared by FBI, Civil Rights Martyr Finally Hailed as Hero

Viola Liuzzo was the only white female killed in the civil rights movement. She is pictured here on a four-day march to protest for equal voting rights in Alabama in 1965, just before her murder by Ku Klux Klan members. (Photos courtesy of the Liuzzo family via Detroit Free Press video)

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A civil rights icon many people have never heard of is being honored this month in Detroit, thanks in large part to two women who think Viola Liuzzo deserves to be remembered by more than a weathered sign in an unkempt park and a besmirched reputation.

Liuzzo, 39, the only white female killed during the civil rights movement, was horrified by the events of “Bloody Sunday,” the day in March 1965 when more than 50 people were hospitalized after being beaten with police billy clubs while crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, AL.

“It’s everybody’s fight,” she said at the time, kissing her husband and children goodbye and heading south to Selma to join the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s march for equal voting rights to Montgomery, AL.

Liuzzo completed the historic four-day, 54-mile march, and was driving a black man from Montgomery to Selma when Ku Klux Klan members tried to force her from the road and then shot her, riddling her body and car with bullets.

No one was ever convicted in Liuzzo’s murder, and back home in Detroit, she was hardly hailed as a hero.

Crosses were burned at the home she shared with her five children, ages 6-18, and her husband, Anthony Liuzzo Sr., who had to hire an armed guard to protect his family.

Liuzzo’s name was tarnished in a smear campaign orchestrated by J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI, which circulated rumors that she had driven south to have sex with black men, was a drug addict and was an unfit mother, according to government records the family worked to have unsealed.

On the day after her mother’s funeral, adults lined the streets and hurled racial slurs at 6-year-old Sally Liuzzo, who understood neither the aspersions nor the hatred that bred them, and pelted her with rocks.

Park Sign a Metaphor for How Liuzzo Was Treated

Colette Mezza, of St. Clair Shores, knew nothing of Liuzzo until a couple of years ago, when she learned of the Detroit woman’s sacrifice in a series of stories examining watershed moments in the civil rights movement on NPR.

A detail in the story surfaced as a metaphor for the way Liuzzo was treated, and it haunted Mezza.

“It’s all tore up and definitely could use at least a paint job,” the slain civil rights activist’s youngest daughter, Sally Liuzzo-Prado, said of the weathered sign and unkempt park in the interview with NPR.

Liuzzo-Pardo and her siblings wanted more for their mother, for her to be remembered as the Viola Liuzzo they knew – a determined woman driven from her comfortable home to the dangerous front lines of the civil rights battle, to do what small part she could to correct wrongs.

So Mezza called her longtime friend and running partner, Julie Hamilton, of Royal Oak, and the two talked about what should be done to help right the wrong that history had done to Viola Liuzzo. Together, they hatched a plan to restore both the park and the slain activist’s name through the newly sprouted Viola Liuzzo Park Association.

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On Saturday – what would be Liuzzo’s 90th birthday – the Viola Liuzzo Park Association will unveil a $500,000 park renovation plan that will include playground equipment, recreational trails and interpretive signage to tell Liuzzo’s story.

The event, which the organizers hope will cross racial lines, is meant to bridge Detroit and the suburbs, and the gap between young and old.

“It’s about even more than a celebration of her and her family and restoring honor to their mother’s name,” Mezza told the Detroit Free Press. “It’s really about restoring Detroit and people’s faith that good things can happen.”

As Mezza and Hamilton went door to door to gather support for the project, they discovered others who shared their outrage that there isn’t a proper memorial for Liuzzo – who lived in California and Pennsylvania before moving to Detroit with her husband, an official with the Teamsters Union – in her adopted hometown.

Among them is Michigan Coalition for Human Rights and civil rights attorney Dean Robb, who will share Liuzzo’s story at a fundraiser to spruce up the park in a manner befitting an authentic hero in one of the bloodiest chapters in the civil rights movement.

Robb assisted the Liuzzo children in unsealing government files that exposed the smear campaign mounted to reduce sympathy for their mother, and to draw attention away from the fact that one of the men in the group that murdered Liuzzo was a paid FBI informant.

Elizabeth (Libbie) Lamott Rutherford of Ferndale, the mother of two toddlers, said she wants to help, too, “mom to mom.”

“I know I love my family, and I’m sure she loved her family just as much,” Rutherford told the Free Press. “She was doing something for everybody, and if there’s something I can do to make people know her, I want to be a part of that.”

In a League with Nelson Mandela

It isn’t that Liuzzo’s sacrifice has been ignored altogether.

A memorial marker along U.S. Route 80 in Lowndes County, AL, remembers the spot where Liuzzo was murdered by Klansmen on March 25, 1965.

In 2013, Liuzzo was posthumously awarded the Ford Freedom Humanitarian Award, an honor bestowed by Dearborn-based Ford Motor Co. to only one other person: Nelson Mandela.

She also received the Alice and Clifford Spendlove Prize in Social Justice, Diplomacy and Tolerance by the University of California-Merced in 2014.

Liuzzo-Prado said it is satisfying to finally see her mother publicly recognized, but even more moving was a conversation she had with Martin Luther King III at the dedication of the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery.

“He pulled me aside, said, ‘I wanted you to know something: 30 years ago, my dad couldn’t be in this ballroom. And today you and I are here together, and it’s because of your mother.’ And I’ve never forgotten that,” Liuzzo-Prado told NPR.

But the current effort to remember the civil rights martyr has breath and life, and corrects the historical record about what drove Viola Liuzzo south during turbulent times.

“That Lady Was Brave”

Artis Johnson, 77, the so-called father of the neighborhood where the park sits, likes that.

He and a neighbor have been mowing the grass and galvanizing cleanup activities in the park for the last several years since Detroit dropped maintenance activities there to close budget gaps.

Johnson never met Liuzzo, but he knows better than most the discrimination that drove her to Selma 50 years ago last month.

He grew up in Alabama, where he drank from the colored-only water fountains, ate lunch in the black section at the drugstore, and protested in a sit-in before fleeing the bigotry of the South for Detroit the same year Liuzzo was murdered.

Johnson and his family were among the first African-Americans to move to what was a predominantly white neighborhood in 1972. He has witnessed its decline, and regards the planned improvements to the park as both a proper memorial to Liuzzo and a symbol of hope for the children of the neighborhood.

The improvements also show Liuzzo’s children “their mom didn’t die in vain” and that she “will always be living in this spot,” Johnson told the Free Press.

“That lady was brave,” he said. “She was determined.”

And as for today’s generation?

“They call me the father of the neighborhood because I know these kids want a better life,” Johnson said. “But if you don’t show them a better life, how are they gonna know what a better life is all about?’’

Daughter Mary Liuzzo Lilleboe, 67, who now lives in Oregon, said her family approves of the plan and embraces the people behind it.

“I just think the park and the group that is putting it together is so symbolically beautiful,” Lilleboe told the Free Press. “It’s a symbolic representation of her, and I think she would be thrilled for anything for kids, and certainly anything that could be done for brotherhood and unity.”

Members of Liuzzo’s family will return for this week’s celebrations. Four of the five children left Detroit after their father died in 1978, not because of racial tension, but because there was nothing still holding them in the area.

Together in Selma for 50th Anniversary

Four of the siblings were together in Selma last month to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the violence on the Edmund Pettus Bridge that shook people like their mother out of complacency and drove them to help those struggling to vote in the racially segregated South.

In some respects, President Barack Obama might have been speaking directly to them in what some called the speech of a lifetime, said Lilleboe, who has sojourned to Alabama to commemorate the anniversary of the march for the past 11 years. Among the president’s remarks:

“ … We gather here to honor the courage of ordinary Americans willing to endure billy clubs and the chastening rod; tear gas and the trampling hoof; men and women who despite the gush of blood and splintered bone would stay true to their North Star and keep marching toward justice. ...

“The Americans who crossed this bridge were not physically imposing. But they gave courage to millions. They held no elected office. But they led a nation. They marched as Americans who had endured hundreds of years of brutal violence, and countless daily indignities – but they didn’t seek special treatment, just the equal treatment promised to them almost a century before.”

“It was a very spiritual moment,” Lilleboe said. ”You have to picture the whole scene. Tens of thousands of people and the Edmund Pettus Bridge in the background and he’s there talking ... and to have my mom included in that story. It was such a feeling of validation and pride knowing that my mother was a part of making that possible.”

Even today, Lilleboe is questioned about the rumor the FBI planted, that Liuzzo was an unfit mother who abandoned her children.

“The truth is, my mother loved us enough to want this to be a better world,” Lilleboe said. “The question isn’t why did my mom go; it’s why didn’t everybody go?”

» Daily events will be held Thursday through Tuesday to honor Viola Liuzzo. Read about them here.