by Kathleen Cross | Jul 20, 2008 | Uncategorized |
Did you know there was a white woman who was murdered by the Klan because of her involvement in the American Civil Rights Movement?
Viola Liuzzo with her children
Did you know she was a wife and mother of five children?
Did you know that among her last statements to her husband before she died was that the struggle for civil rights for black Americans was “everybody’s fight?”
Did you know the day after she was murdered, President Lyndon Johnson called her husband Jim to say, “I don’t think she died in vain because this is going to be a battle, all out as far as I’m concerned,” and Jim responded, “My wife died for a sacred battle, the rights of humanity. She had one concern and only one in mind. She took a quote from Abraham Lincoln that all men are created equal and that’s the way she believed.”
That woman was Viola Liuzzo (1925-1965). She sacrificed her life for Civil Rights.
Viola Fauver Liuzzo belonged to the NAACP at the height of the civil rights movement. In 1965, she marched with Martin Luther King from Selma to Montgomery. After the march, Liuzzo and her black co-worker, Leroy Merton, shuttled marchers to the airport. They were spotted by four Ku Klux Klansmen (one of whom was on the FBI’s payroll) who followed the pair and shot them. Liuzzo died instantly. Merton survived.
Can someone explain to me why this woman’s photograph isn’t on the wall in every classroom in America?
Please read the article below. Viola Liuzzo once said to a friend “…You and I are going to change the world. One day they’ll write about us. You’ll see.”
They did write about her. Now, if only more folks would read about her, she may get the hero status she deserves:
Viola Liuzzo: ‘We’re going to change the world’
By Minnie Bruce Pratt
Published Mar 2, 2005 1:49 PM
After years, decades, centuries of struggle, the Black civil rights movement celebrated one of its greatest triumphs on March 25, 1965. On that historic day, some 25,000 pro testers of all nationalities marched into Montgomery, Ala.–a former capital of the slave-owning Confed eracy in the 19th century.
The protesters were completing a four-day march from Selma, Ala. An attempt to march the same route earlier in the month to protest the Feb. 18 killing of African American voter-rights activist Jimmy Lee Jackson had been met with intense repression. On Sunday”–March 7, 1965–Alabama state troopers on horseback had tear-gassed and mercilessly clubbed 600 women, men and children as they marched peacefully across the Edmund Pettus Bridge.
Viola Liuzzo
After this outrage, civil-rights leader the Rev. Martin Luther King sent out an appeal across the country for all who supported the African American freedom movement to come to Selma.
One of the thousands who answered that call was Viola Liuzzo, a 39-year-old white woman from Detroit. On the evening of March 25, as she was ferrying an African American marcher back to his home in her car, a carload of Ku Klux Klan members forced her car off the road, shot and killed her.
Liuzzo was the only white woman to give her life during the Black civil-rights movement of the 1960s. With that sacrifice, she joined a handful of white men, like the Rev. James Reeb, killed in Selma earlier the same month.
She also joined the hundreds of thousands, the millions, of known and unknown Africans and African Americans who had fought and died for their freedom—from the 40 who fell in battle against South Carolina slave owners at Stono River in 1739, to Jimmy Lee Jackson. Jackson, a 27-year-old farm laborer and pulpwood cutter, who was shot down on Feb. 18, 1965, at a voter-rights protest in Marion, Ala., as he attempted to protect his mother and grandfather from the clubs of the state troopers.
A recently released film, “Home of the Brave,” dir ected by Paola di Florio, attempts to document Liuzzo’s life and legacy. It does give a glimpse into the background of this almost unknown anti-racist fighter, but without fully exploring all the forces that shaped her.
Courage in the struggle
What experiences led Liuzzo to reject racism and segregation, and to journey South into struggle?
She was born in 1925 into a coal-mining family in Pennsylvania. Her father made 50 cents a day when he could find work. He received no compensation from the mine owners after he lost a hand in an accident. As the family quickly sank into poverty and moved from town to town through Tennessee and Georgia, Liuzzo saw firsthand the violence and degradation of racism toward African Americans.
During World War II the family moved North to find jobs. Her father worked at a bomber plant in Ypsilanti, and her mother at a Ford plant in Detroit. Liuzzo found wartime work in a cafeteria, married, and became close friends with Sarah Evans, an African American woman through whom she joined the NAACP.
Liuzzo organized locally for an end to discrimination in education and for economic justice. She was arrested twice and insisted on a public trial to bring attention to these causes. (Joanne Giannino, Dictionary of Unitarian and Universalist Biography)
According to Liuzzo’s daughter, Mary Liuzzo Lilleboe, “My mother was raised in the South and she followed the whole labor story.” She noted that the FBI files from the investigation of Liuzzo’s death show Liuzzo wrote letters “to protest the government’s witch-hunt of the labor unions.”
Liuzzo resisted her oppression as a woman as well. When she went back to school as a high-school dropout, working-class housewife and mother of five, she wrote, “I protest the attitude of the great majority of men who hold to the conviction that any married woman who is unable to find contentment and self-satisfaction when confined to homemaking displays a lack of emotional health.”
After the death of one of her children at birth, she broke with the Catholic Church because it decreed that unbaptized babies spend eternity in “limbo.” She joined a local Unitarian Universalist Church where many of the members had been Freedom Riders in an earlier struggle against segregation in public transportation.
In an interview, Evans later said of her friend: “Viola Liuzzo lived a life that combined the care of her family and her home with a concern for the world around her. This involvement with her at times was not always understood by her friends; nor was it appreciated by those around her.”
Smearing a radical
After Liuzzo’s death, the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover began a smear campaign against her. She was red-baited and accused of sexual immorality, in particular with African American men.
An FBI informant, Gary Rowe, was implicated in her death. He was in the car on the night of her killing with Klan members subsequently charged with her murder. The three Klansmen were acquitted by the state, but later served 10-year federal sentences for violation of Liuzzo’s civil rights. Rowe was never charged for any crime and escaped into the Federal Witness Protection Program.
Of the Liuzzo documentary, director di Florio observed: “I experienced my own loss of innocence. It hadn’t occurred to me before making this film that reckless collection of data, inconsistent accounts of the incident, and flat-out lies about Viola Liuzzo could all be part of ‘official documents.’ As I began to meet with leaders in the field of government, politics and history, I realized that this was quite common, in fact. What happened to Liuzzo could happen to any of us.” (Emerging Pictures)
Di Florio’s film shows Liuzzo’s life and also focuses on her legacy. Unfortunately, the documentary dishonors Liuzzo’s sacrifice by implying that her death and the smear campaign that followed somehow led her sons down a reactionary path. The youngest, Tony, became second in command of the Michigan Militia. The oldest, Tommy, joined white “survivalists” in Alabama. The film shows an effigy meant to represent an
African American hanging from a noose in their campground.
This is truly heart-wrenching information, given that one of the most touching scenes in the documentary is the TV footage shot immediately after Liuzzo’s death, when 14-year-old Tommy says to reporters, “She wanted equal rights for everyone, no matter what the cost!”
But the film doesn’t explore the larger economic and social factors that inexorably shape the lives of every child in her or his own historical period, no matter what their parents’ politics.
Liuzzo’s legacy
Liuzzo’s oldest daughter, Mary Lille boe, offers the beginning of an explanation more rooted in the material reality of workers’ lives: “The issues we face are well beyond the immediate. Both the Demo crats and Republicans are capitalist and are wrong. I know this lesser-of-two-evils argument and I think it is very narrow in its vision….
“We saw what the government was capable of doing when it felt threatened by what my mother stood for. The organizations that were supposed to defend workers did nothing. The militias developed because workers, like our family, were abandoned.”
“We need something new. Socialism is a dirty word in this country because it threatens people at the top. I don’t think it’s an accident that people today are attracted to my mother’s story.”
Liuzzo herself was full of hope, and conscious that the future would include more than just her story.
According to Sarah Evans, Liuzzo would often say: “Sarah, you and I are going to change the world. One day they’ll write about us. You’ll see.”
It is worth noting that “Home of the Brave” gives no details of Sarah Evans’ political life or history.
Di Florio’s documentary does not show Liuzzo’s vision, or her understanding that the struggle was more than her individual story.
One scene from the documentary captures the necessity of the continuing fight to secure the most basic democratic rights for oppressed nationalities in the United States. At a voting site in Selma during the 2000 election, a Black poll worker sits at a table side by side with an older white poll worker. The latter is asked what he remembers of Viola Liuzzo, and answers after a sour look that he doesn’t think a woman like that should have come to Selma.
The Black man turns to the camera and says that he feels that Liuzzo was a fine woman. And one image of Liuzzo lingers in the mind’s eye: a photograph of her in the line of march, a few miles from Montgomery. She is walking barefooted, carrying her shoes, looking ahead, completely focused on the goal of freedom.
________________________________________
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by Kathleen Cross | Jul 12, 2008 | "race", anti-racist, heroes, i rant, privilege, seriously?, slavery, stereotypes, transformation, young people |
I was returning home to Los Angeles on a flight from Atlanta, where I’d spent a couple of days at a writer’s conference.
Weary from a weekend filled with late night poetry jams and early morning workshops, I boarded the half-empty redeye, found my aisle seat, shoved my bulging carryon bag under the empty middle seat, stretched my legs and thanked the airline gods for arranging an entire row just for me.
I closed my eyes as the last few stragglers made their way to their seats, and got an early start on what I hoped would be a long nap.
“Excuse me, Ma’am.” The voice was deep, the accent, southern.
I opened my eyes to an attractive white man in his early twenties looking down at me. He pointed at the empty seat next to me, shrugged a sheepish apology, and stepped back to let me stand, which I did. He didn’t take the empty window seat. Instead, he plopped his duffel bag near the window and sat himself down right next to me, which meant, of course, that I would have to move my bag.
I reached down and tugged at the strap, but my tightly wedged carryon didn’t budge. “I’ll get that,” he offered. He yanked the bag out, slid it to me and helped me squeeze it under the seat in front of me. It didn’t occur to the guy to just move over to the empty window seat. He flashed a perfect soap opera star smile at me, stowed his bag under the window seat and stretched his legs.
“Hey, what’s this?” He bent over to reach for something on the floor in front of him and came up with an award I had been given at the conference. He read the inscription aloud, “Best Contemporary Fiction,” then looked me over. “Wow,” he said with a raised eyebrow. His expression said my sporty pink jogging suit and Adidas cross trainers didn’t jibe with his vision of what an award-winning author might look like up close. “You’re a writer?”
There goes my nap. I knew in that moment I would spend my five-hour flight locked in conversation. It was inevitable. He would ask me what my book was about and as soon as I said, it’s a novel about a woman who’s half black but looks white,” he would take note of my ivory skin and blue eyes and realize, correctly, that I wrote the book from my own experience. Then the questions would start.
“You’re black? Wow. You don’t look it.” He was immediately intrigued, as are most white people when they meet me. I haven’t completely figured it out, but I suspect their fascination has to do with my apparent whiteness and my paradoxical belonging in the black community (where the majority of people who look like me feel anything but a sense of belonging).
Just as black people often joke that I am a spy infiltrating the white ranks, I suppose white people see me as an insider to the black world—an undercover comrade who can interpret what I’ve seen and experienced in ways they can relate to. That’s the only explanation I have for the ridiculous comments some white folks make when they discover my dual ethnicity.
In addition to the many off-the-wall questions I’m asked (Can you dance like a black person? Why don’t black people swim? Is that penis size thing really true?), white people say things to me they would never say to a more phenotypically obvious black person. For instance, I once had a white woman refer to the black man she had recently stopped dating as “too black.” When I asked what that meant, she explained matter-of-factly, “He’s ignorant and has no ambition.”
In my younger days I bristled at these exchanges, but as I’ve grown older I’ve come to the conclusion that each time I respond to these ignorant questions and statements with some degree of patience, the world becomes a slightly better place. In most cases I find that the decision to practice patience has a positive affect on the outcomes of these exchanges—including the impending conversation with the middle seat taker.
After he introduced himself as Jason, an actor on his way to Hollywood to audition for (who woulda guessed it?) a soap opera, he tugged and nudged me into a conversation that can best be described as Everything Jason Ever Wanted to Know/Say About Black People But Was Afraid to Ask/Get His Ass Whupped. He began the discussion by saying with wide-eyed sincerity, “I don’t have a racist bone in my body.” He punctuated that idea by adding that he had “even dated black girls.”
While the other passengers slept soundly, Jason and I struggled to keep our voices at a half-whisper as we discussed topic after touchy topic. We talked about the overrepresentation of black people in the criminal justice system. Jason chalked it up to the “fact” that black people are more likely than whites to use illegal drugs. I countered with a government study that found 75% of regular drug users were white and only 8% black; yet 43% of those imprisoned on drug charges were black, and 25% were white. Of course, at the root of that is the fact that blacks are five times more likely to be targeted for arrest than whites for drug crimes (Source: U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services.)
Jason and I discussed the underrepresentation of black students in college. He believed that was “of course” because black kids and their parents don’t value education. I explained that the best predictor of college entry and success is the quality of middle and high school curriculum. White high school students are three times more likely to be taught challenging coursework as blacks and twice as likely to be taught by an experienced teacher with specific expertise in the subject being taught. (Source: The Education Trust, “Achievement in America”)
We talked about interracial marriage. Jason will date, but couldn’t see himself marrying a black woman, though in his experience he found “mixed” kids to be more beautiful and more intelligent than “regular” black kids—a comment that I, being “mixed” was supposed to have taken as a compliment. Of course my counter argument for that ridiculousness was a thorough lesson on white supremacy and how it permeates everything in America – including how we arrive at our decisions about who is “beautiful” and who is “intelligent.”
Although there were many tense moments in our conversation, during which I had to struggle to maintain my calm, by far the most excruciating subject for me to endure was the one we spent over two hours entrenched in—slavery. I was astounded by Jason’s ignorance of the institution itself. Not only did he reiterate my elementary school teacher’s beliefs about slaves being relatively happy family members, he went so far as to repeat a joke he’d recently heard on a talk radio show which callously declared that American blacks shouldn’t be worrying about reparations, but “ought to be happy we aren’t charging them for their ancestors’ cruise over here.”
Jason seemed (keeping in mind he’s an actor) to have no idea that the Middle Passage constituted a holocaust of unprecedented proportions. Even conservative estimates place the number of slaves who died of abuse, disease, suicide and malnourishment during the Atlantic slave trade in the millions. The “cruises” Jason spoke of were months-long torturous voyages during which the “passengers” were chained to one another on stacked wooden bunks with less than a foot of space on either side. The kidnapped Africans who managed to survive day after day of writhing in blood, vomit, menstrual flow and excrement were delivered to the auction block and sold to the highest bidders. Women and girls had no defense against rape and were mated with men they did not know so they would produce children over whom they had no parental rights. Happy to be slaves? I don’t think so.
When confronted with that reality, Jason didn’t think so either.
What was most disheartening to me was that at his age, and with the advances in “multicultural education” this nation has supposedly made a commitment to, I expected the information I was sharing with Jason to have been taught to him in school. I told him about my experience with my elementary teacher Miss Lewis some thirty years previous—about her insistence that her heroes were good people who behaved in accordance with the times in which they lived; about her ignorance of the many anti-racist Americans who did live during those times but did not uphold the status quo; I talked to Jason about how I was impacted as a child by my teacher’s refusal to denounce slavery.
Though Jason was educated two decades after me, he said he had received the same messages my teacher delivered to me. He knew that Thomas Jefferson and George Washington owned slaves, but when I asked him whether America’s most revered historical icons were racists, his answer was a safe, “I don’t know. It seems like it.” When I reminded him that America was “the Land of the Free” whose credo is “Liberty and Justice for All,” and whose currency is embellished with the phrase “E Pluribus Unum” (Out of Many One) he admitted that the heroes he was taught to admire and emulate did not live up to those ideals.
When asked to name a white American historical figure other than Abe Lincoln who sacrificed life, liberty or livelihood on behalf of human rights for all people, he could not offer Thomas Paine, John Brown, James and Lucretia Mott, Thaddeus Stevens, Henry David Thoreau, John and Jean Rankin, John Howard Griffin, Penny Patch, Viola Liuzzo, or any of America’s other thousands of white anti-racist heroes. WIth the exception of Lincoln, whose commitment to human rights has been furiously debated by historians, Jason had not one anti-racist role model he had ever been taught to look to for education or inspiration.
Upon our arrival at LAX, Jason said our conversation was one that forever changed him. He thanked me for challenging him to think more deeply about his responsibility—not just to denounce racism, white privilege and white supremacy, but to educate himself about it and to be a part of dismantling it. I hope Jason wasn’t pretending, but even if he was, it was that five-hour interaction with a young white man I would not see or speak to again that stands as one of the most frustrating, at times infuriating and ultimately inspiring conversations about black/white race relations I’ve ever experienced.
It was a conversation that sparked the idea for the book I’m currently working on — a learning tool where young people might come to “Know Good White People.”
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