Viola Gregg was born on April 11, 1925, in California, Pennsylvania. She was raised in rural Georgia and Tennessee and attended segregated schools. During World War II, she moved with her family to Ypsilanti, Michigan, where she worked at Ford's Willow Run Bomber Plant. At 18 she moved on to Detroit, found employment as a waitress, married restaurant manager George Argyris in 1943 and had two daughters. In 1949 Liuzzo divorced Argyris and the following year married Anthony James Liuzzo, a Teamsters Union organizer, with whom she had two sons and another daughter.
By 1965 Liuzzo was a 39-year-old, middle-class housewife and mother of five. After her youngest child started school, she enrolled as a part-time student at Wayne State University and was inspired by returning students' reports about the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer project to register black voters. In March 1965, she participated in sympathy marches to demonstrate solidarity with Black citizens in Selma, Alabama, who were planning a pilgrimage to the state capitol to support passage of a federal voting-rights bill.
On March 7, 1965, Liuzzo watched news broadcasts of state troopers armed with billy clubs and tear gas attack 600 demonstrators crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge on their way to Montgomery. Civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. called off the attempt and issued a national appeal for Americans to come to Selma, join the marchers, and help them try again. Liuzzo and 25,000 other Americans answered his call.
Within 24 hours, the FBI had taken four suspects into custody, and Pres. Lyndon Johnson praised the bureau for its excellent work. Collie LeRoy Wilkins, 21; William Orville Eaton, 41; Eugene Thomas, 42; and Gary Thomas Rowe, 42, were indicted on April 6, 1965. Nine days later, all charges against Rowe were dropped, and he was identified as a paid undercover FBI informant who would testify for the prosecution.
While Liuzzo was being honored as a martyr, Bureau Director J. Edgar Hoover was increasingly concerned about the embarrassing fact that Rowe had telephoned his FBI contact on March 25 and received permission to "work" during the march despite his history of violent behavior toward civil-rights activists. Rowe had participated in the beatings of Freedom Riders in Birmingham in 1961 and was suspected of involvement in the 1963 bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. In order to deflect criticism, Hoover shifted the focus of the national news coverage from the FBI to Liuzzo's motivation for joining the march. He consistently referred to her as an "outside agitator," despite her southern upbringing, and at a private meeting with President Johnson reported that Liuzzo's husband Jim was a Teamsters organizer with "a shady background." Hoover also suggested that Liuzzo and Moton had stopped for a romantic interlude. When the president ignored his innuendos, Hoover instructed FBI staff to leak his speculations to the bureau's Klan informants, who subsequently leaked them to the press. Liuzzo was widely portrayed in the media as an unstable woman who had abandoned her family to cause trouble in the South.
On May 3, 1965, the trial of Collie Leroy Wilkins, alleged by the prosecution to be the trigger man in the Liuzzo murder, began in Hayneville, Lowndes County. Defense attorney Matthew Hobson Murphy Jr., Grand Klonsel of the United Klans of America, informed the jury that since Rowe had broken his Klan loyalty oath by testifying against his fellow Klansmen they should not believe anything he said, and that Liuzzo was a white woman alone in a car with a black man at night and whatever happened to her was her own fault. Murphy was successful in his attempts to blame Liuzzo for her own fate, and the trial ended in a hung jury. In subsequent trials, Alabama juries cleared Wilkins, Eaton, and Thomas, but federal juries convicted them of violating Liuzzo's civil rights and sentenced them to 10 years in prison. Eaton, died in March 1966 before beginning his sentence, whereas Rowe was granted full immunity and placed in the federal witness protection program.
At the same time, the government refused to negotiate the Liuzzo's negligence claim, and the family filed a formal suit in 1979. This case was tried in an Ann Arbor, Michigan, federal district court in 1983 without the benefit of a jury, who might have been sympathetic. On May 27, Judge Charles W. Joiner dismissed it, ruling that there was no evidence of an FBI conspiracy to cause Liuzzo's death. The case was considered a test of the FBI's obligation to protect citizens and was constitutionally significant for future civil-rights litigation.
The 1965 murder of Viola Liuzzo engaged the nation in a heated debate about a woman's obligations to her family and to society at large. Liuzzo had violated traditional cultural boundaries to demonstrate on behalf of black civil rights, a movement that a majority of white Americans believed was too aggressive. It took almost a quarter century to formally recognize Liuzzo's efforts. In 1989, she became one of 40 civil-rights martyrs whose lives were commemorated on the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery. In 1991, the Women of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference erected a stone marker on Highway 80 at the spot where she was murdered. It is inscribed "In memory of our sister Viola Liuzzo who gave her life in the struggle for the right to vote March 25, 1965." The monument has been and continues to be the subject of vandalism.
Additional Resources
Stanton, Mary. From Selma To Sorrow: The Life and Death of Viola Liuzzo. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998.
Additional Resources
Stanton, Mary. From Selma To Sorrow: The Life and Death of Viola Liuzzo. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998.