Viola Fauver Liuzzo (née Gregg; April 11, 1925 – March 25, 1965) was an American civil rights activist. In March 1965 she drove from her home in Detroit, Michigan to Alabama to support the Selma to Montgomery march for voting rights. On March 25 she was shot dead by three members of the Ku Klux Klan while driving activists between the cities.
An FBI informant, Gary T. Rowe, was involved in her death. His role in this and other events was not revealed until 1978. To deflect attention from the FBI, its head J. Edgar Hoover made defamatory claims about Liuzzo.
Three of her killers (not including Rowe) were charged with murder by the state but not convicted. The federal government charged the three Klan members with conspiracy to intimidate African Americans under the 1871 Ku Klux Klan Act, a Reconstruction era civil rights statute. On December 3, the trio was found guilty by an all-white, all-male jury, a landmark in Southern legal history. They were sentenced to ten years in prison. Rowe testified in this case and was put in the witness protection program for his safety. He lived until 1998.
In 1983, after learning about the FBI's activities related to the Liuzzo case, her family filed a lawsuit against the FBI for not preventing her death and for damages because of false accusations. The suit was ultimately dismissed. Liuzzo was given many honors posthumously; her name was inscribed on the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama. Her grandson set up a scholarship in her honor.
Viola Fauver Gregg was born on April 11, 1925, in the small town of California, Pennsylvania, the elder daughter of Eva Wilson, a teacher, and Heber Ernest Gregg, a coal miner and World War I veteran. Her father had taught himself to read as a child and left school in the eighth grade. Her mother had a teaching certificate from Southwestern Pennsylvania Normal School (later California University of Pennsylvania and currently Pennsylvania Western University, California). The couple had a second daughter, Rose Mary, in 1930.
Heber lost his right hand in a mine explosion when they were living in Georgia. It was during the Great Depression, and the Greggs became solely dependent on Eva's income. She had difficulty finding anything other than short-term teaching positions. Struggling with poverty, when Viola was six the family decided to move from Georgia to Chattanooga, Tennessee, where Eva found a teaching position.
The family was very poor and lived in one-room shacks with no running water. The schools Liuzzo attended did not have adequate supplies, and teachers had little time to deal with the many children in need. Because the family moved so often, Liuzzo usually began and ended the year in different schools. Having been poor in Tennessee for much of her childhood and adolescence, she was close to the racially segregated nature of the South. This would have a powerful influence on her activism.
In 1941, the Gregg family moved to Ypsilanti, Michigan, where her father sought work to assemble bombs 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, and she returned to her family.
Two years later, the Gregg family moved to Detroit, Michigan, 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 and rioting between racial and ethnic groups. Viola Gregg witnessed some of these, which influenced her later civil rights work.
In 1943, she married George Argyris, the manager of a restaurant where she worked. They had two children, Penny and Evangeline Mary. They divorced in 1949.
Two years later, Gregg married Anthony Liuzzo, a Teamsters union business agent. They had three children together: Tommy, Anthony Jr., and Sally. They also raised her first two daughters.
Liuzzo wanted to gain more education and trained to become a medical laboratory assistant at the Carnegie Institute in Detroit, Michigan. In 1962 she enrolled part-time at Wayne State University to continue her education.
In 1964, she 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, particularly with the NAACP, developed from her close friendship with Sarah Evans, an African-American woman. They had met at a grocery store where Liuzzo worked as a cashier, and kept in touch. Liuzzo hired Evans to help with her child care. After taking on more, she promoted Evans to her fulltime nanny and housekeeper. The two women had both grown up in the South, and found they had similar views on some issues, including support for the civil rights movement. After Liuzzo's death, Evans became the permanent caretaker of her friend's five young children.
Liuzzo protested against Detroit's laws that allowed students to drop out of school more easily. Instead, she wanted families to be helped to get their children educated. She temporarily withdrew her own children from public school to express her opposition to the law. Because she publicly home-schooled them for two months, Liuzzo was arrested. She pleaded guilty in court and was placed on probation.
In the early 1960s, activism increased in the South, especially for voting rights. In February 1965, a night demonstration for voting rights at the Marion, Alabama, courthouse turned violent. State troopers clubbed marchers; they beat and fatally shot Jimmie Lee Jackson, a 26-year-old African-American man. His death spurred the fight for civil rights in nearby Selma, the larger county seat of Dallas County.
Organizers had asked for help from Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., who had been active in efforts to desegregate Birmingham, Alabama. He 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 headed for the Edmund Pettus Bridge to cross the Alabama River and go 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".