Women's History Month
Authors A-H, Of Women

Women’s History Month: Remember Viola Liuzzo – by Terry Howard

Hard to believe that a little over a year ago – April 25, 2025, to be exact – a white woman by the name of Mrs. Viola Liuzzo, if we were blessed to have had her still alive last year, would have been 100 years old. 

So, on March 25, 2026, it will be sixty-one years since an assassin’s bullet in 1965 snuffed out her life on an Alabama highway; sixty-one years since, during the interim, the passage of the Voting Rights Act four months after her death; sixty-one years, during the interim, Dr. King was also felled by an assassin’s bullet; and sixty-one years since, during the interim, that the hard earned right to vote was instrumental in the election of the first African American president of the United States. One could make a compelling argument that Liuzzo’s assassination was a factor in the fight for civil rights.

But for those who’ve never heard of – or vaguely remember her – Viola Liuzzo was an American civil rights activist. In March 1965 she drove from Michigan to Alabama to support the Selma to Montgomery march for voting rights. 

Now given that her life story is compelling, inspirational and warrants a lot more than the limitations of this space – and your undivided attention – would allow, we’ll highlight aspects of her life in this narrative.

Viola Fauver Gregg was born on April 11, 1925, in California, Pennsylvania, the daughter of Eva Wilson, a teacher and Heber Ernest Gregg, a coal miner and World War I veteran who lost his right hand in a mine explosion when they lived in Georgia. During the Great Depression the Greggs became solely dependent on Eva’s income. Struggling with poverty, when Viola was six the family moved from Georgia to Chattanooga, Tennessee, where Eva found a teaching position. Because the family moved so often, Viola usually began and ended the year in different schools. Having been poor for much of her childhood and adolescence, she was close to the racially segregated nature of the South, a powerful influence on her future activism. 

In 1941 the family moved to Ypsilanti, Michigan where her father worked at the Ford Motor Co. Viola dropped out of high school after a year and eloped at the age of 16. Her marriage did not last so she returned to her family.

Two years later, the family moved to Detroit which was segregated by race. Tensions between whites and Blacks were very high as they competed for jobs and housing in a city with many new residents, including immigrants. In the early 1940s there was violence between ethnic groups. Viola witnessed these, which influenced her later civil rights work. 

In 1943 she married George Argyris. They had two children, however, divorced in 1949. Two years later she married Anthony Liuzzo, a Teamsters union business agent. They had three children and raised Viola’s first two daughters. 

Liuzzo trained to become a medical laboratory assistant at the Carnegie Institute in Detroit. In 1962 she enrolled at Wayne State University to continue her education and in 1964 began attending the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Detroit and joined the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). 

A large part of Liuzzo’s activism developed from her close friendship with Sarah Evans, a Black woman. The two found that they had similar views on issues, including support for the civil rights movement. After Liuzzo’s death, Evans became the permanent caretaker of her friend’s five young children. 

While in Detroit, Liuzzo protested Detroit’s laws that allowed students to easily drop out of school and temporarily withdrew their children from public school to express her opposition to the law. Because she publicly home-schooled them for two months, Liuzzo was arrested, pled guilty and was placed on probation. 

In the early 1960s, activism increased in the South, especially for voting rights. In February 1965, a demonstration for voting rights at the Marion, Alabama, courthouse turned violent. State troopers clubbed marchers and beat and fatally shot Jimmie Lee Jackson, a 26-year-old Black man. His death spurred the fight for civil rights in nearby Selma. Organizers asked for help from Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., who had been active in efforts to desegregate in Birmingham. King led the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), whose members planned a protest march for Sunday, March 7, 1965. Gov. George Wallace banned the march, but activists ignored his ban.

Six hundred unarmed marchers heading to the Edmund Pettus Bridge on the way to the state capital were clubbed and whipped by state troopers, fracturing bones and gashing heads. Seventeen people were hospitalized on the day later called “Bloody Sunday“. Images of that brutality sent shock wave globally and brought immediate attention to plight of African Americans in the south.

Like many observers, Viola Liuzzo was horrified by the images broadcasted on national media. A second march took place March 9. Troopers, police, and marchers confronted each other at the county end of the bridge, but the troopers stepped aside to let them pass. 

Soon Liuzzo decided to heed Dr. King’s call for people of all faiths to come to Alabama and, leaving her children in the care of family and friends, she drove to Selma. There she was put to work delivering aid, welcoming and recruiting volunteers, and transporting volunteers and marchers to and from airports, bus terminals and train stations. She volunteered her 1963 Oldsmobile. 

On March 21,1965, more than 3,000 people began the third march, among them Blacks, whites, working-class people, doctors, nurses, priests, nuns, rabbis, homemakers, students, actors and farmers. It took five days for the protesters to reach Montgomery. Along the way, other protesters joined and by the last day, some 25,000 marchers entered Montgomery. Liuzzo marched the first full day and returned to Selma for the night. 

On March 24, Viola rejoined the march four miles from the end. On Thursday, Liuzzo and other marchers reached the state capitol building. After the march, Liuzzo continued shuttling marchers and volunteers from Montgomery back to Selma in her car despite warnings that it was very dangerous. As she was driving along Route 80 to Selma, a car tried to force her off the road. 

After dropping passengers off, Liuzzo headed back to Montgomery but was stopped at a red light when a car with four white men pulled up alongside. As she tried to outrun them they overtook the Oldsmobile and fatally shot Liuzzo in the head.  Four Klan members —Collie Wilkins, FBI informant Gary Rowe, William Eaton and Eugene Thomas —were quickly arrested.  

The Department of Justice charged the defendants with conspiracy to intimidate African Americans under the 1871 Ku Klux Klan Act. On December 3, the trio was found guilty by an all-white, all-male jury, and were sentenced to ten years in prison, a landmark in Southern legal history. The jury acquitted Thomas for the state murder charge after 90 minutes of deliberation. Due to threats from the Klan, both before and after his testimony, Gary Thomas Rowe went into the federal witness protection program. He died in 1998 in Savannah, Georgia, after having lived several decades under several assumed identities. 

Now clearly there’s much more to the Liuzzo story, including a conspiracy authorized by then FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to cover up an FBI agent’s undercover involvement in undermining the protests and Liuzzo’s assassination. The interested reader is encouraged to dig into research.

In the end, the lesson of Viola Liuzzo’s life is that you don’t have to sit on the sidelines while rights and privileges you enjoy are denied to others based on their skin color, culture, religion, sex, age or other difference. Her death reminds us that, in the words of Dr. King. “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere!”

In closing and in parting  – and during these waning days of Women’s History Month – Mrs. Liuzzo, although we lost you on that dreadful day in 1965, your contributions in making our nation live up to its professed ideals are permanently etched in our memories…. never to be dislodged.  

Terry Howard
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