Viola Gregg Liuzzo

Viola Fauver Gregg Liuzzo (born Gregg ; born April 11, 1925 in California , Pennsylvania , † March 25, 1965 in Selma , Alabama ) was an American civil rights activist .

Family and education

Viola Gregg grew up as the daughter of a European teacher and an unemployed miner in poor conditions in Tennessee and Georgia . The southern states were racially segregated , discriminatory and hatred during this period , but the Gregg family felt more attached to the oppressed blacks than to the wealthy whites.

The family moved to Michigan during World War II and Gregg took a job as a waitress in a cafeteria. She married and had two daughters; her best friend Sarah Evans was black. Divorced in 1949, she married union activist Anthony Liuzzo two years later, with whom she had three other children. While she began training as a medical technical assistant (MTA) at the Carnegie Institute in Detroit in 1961 , Evans worked for the family as a housekeeper and nanny. In 1963, she continued her education at Wayne State University .

Civil Rights Movement and Death

In addition to her education and the eventful family life, Liuzzo took part in local campaigns to improve education and social justice. She has been arrested twice, pleaded guilty, and insisted on trial to gain greater publicity.

In 1964 she became a member of the Unitarian Universalist Church in Detroit.

In early 1965, Viola Liuzzo, like millions of other Americans, saw the news on television of the first of the Selma-to-Montgomery marches , "Bloody Sunday," in which 500 peaceful citizens were blown apart by gas grenades by police at a suffrage rally in Selma , Alabama were. A call was made within the Unitarian congregations to travel to Selma and support Martin Luther King . She decided to stay and work there for at least a week.

Among other things, she helped drive demonstrators in her car. During one of these transports, a car approached her vehicle from which she was shot. Their car drove into the ditch, their passengers pretended to be dead and probably saved their lives.

Memorial stone to Viola Liuzzo in Lowndes County, Alabama

Her four murderers, members of the Ku Klux Klan , were charged and brought to justice. Although one of the men admitted what she did when testifying as a key witness and thereby gaining immunity, the other three were not convicted of murder. They received ten years in prison for violating Liuzzo's civil rights . Following this process, Liuzzo was politically and morally defamed in public by KKK sympathizers, which at times had regional success.

After her children tried unsuccessfully in a court case from 1979 to 1983 to prove complicity with the FBI , Viola Gregg Liuzzo was not fully rehabilitated until 2002 and officially honored with a plaque in Boston .

In the film Selma (2014) , Liuzzo is portrayed by Tara Ochs .

literature

• Mary Stanton: From Selma to Sorrow: The Life and Death of Viola Liuzzo (1998)
• Gerd Presler: Martin Luther King, rororo Bildmonographien 50333, 18th edition, Reinbek 2017, p. 114.
• James P. Turner: Selma and the Liuzzo Murder Trials: The First Modern Civil Rights Convictions. University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor 2018, ISBN 978-0-472-07374-0 .

Web links

• Biography in the Dictionary of Unitarian and Universalist Biography ( Memento from December 3, 2013 in the Internet Archive )
• Liuzzo on talktogether