Viola Fauver Liuzzo 1925-1965
Viola could have stayed home. No one would have criticized her. After all, she was a white housewife with 5 children. The last place her presence would be expected was Selma Alabama at the height of racial tension and violence. But that is where she went…to Selma. She heard the call of Dr. Martin Luther King. And traveled from Detroit Michigan to Selma in the wake of the Bloody Sunday attempt to march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge.
Viola Fauver Gregg was born April 11, 1925, in the small town of California Pennsylvania. During the Depression, work was hard to come by. So Viola and her family lived in poverty… one-room shacks and no running water. The family moved to Tennessee where she had first-hand experience of the segregated nature of the South. This deeply impacted her and would significantly influence her subsequent activism.
The Gregg family moved on to Michigan where she grew into adulthood. She met and married Anthony Liuzzo, a union organizer, and was the mother of 5. Mrs. Liuzzo enrolled at Wayne State University in 1962. She was a member of the First Unitarian Church of Detroit and the NAACP. She became close friends with Sarah Evans, an African American woman she met at the grocery store where Viola had been a cashier. And that friendship endured. Ms. Evans would go on to become the permanent caretaker of Mrs. Liuzzo’s 5 children after her death.
On March 25, 1965, Mrs. Liuzzo assisted by Mr. Leroy Moton a 19-year-old African American was shuttling marchers and volunteers from Montgomery to Selma in her car. As they were driving along Route 80 a car tried to force them off the road. After dropping passengers in Selma, she and Moton headed back to Montgomery. When she stopped at the red light four local Klansmen pulled up alongside her. Seeing a Black man and a white woman in the car, they chased and overtook them. They fired directly at Mrs. Liuzzo mortally wounding her with two shots to the head. Mr. Moton barely survived the attack. The Klansmen were apprehended and put on trial. But a jury of all white men failed to convict. They were later charged by the Justice Dept. and found guilty of violating Mrs. Liuzzo’s civil rights. They were sentenced to ten years in federal prison.
Mrs. Liuzzo understood that the struggle for human dignity, justice, and equality belonged to everyone. She felt it so deeply that she showed up and put her body on the line. She reminds us that our souls know no color, gender, sexual preference, or social status. And there exists as part of the human spirit a call to do what is right…to do the good thing…that which lifts us all. How we respond to and heed that call is a personal matter. Who steps up? Viola did.
Mrs. Viola Fauver Liuzzo is an Inspirator