Critical Race Theory and Forgotten History: Klan Murders A White Woman Who Dared To March With Blacks for Voting Rights in Alabama

Viola Liuzzo in a family portrait and working with marchers in Selma, AL

Lowndes County, Alabama, March 25, 1965— A Detroit mother was murdered by the Klan on this day because she believed in equality and justice and came to Alabama to march with Blacks protesting for their civil rights.

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 7^th, 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 25^th, 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 30^th 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.