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Malcolm X has a cult following among kids today -- not only black ones -- who think he was a baaaad dude, hip and cool in a way "Saint" Martin Luther King was not. Both men died at 39, and long ago became immortal. Every year the anniversaries of their passings are marked with speeches and ceremonies. King has his own national holiday, when other martyrs and heroes of the civil rights movement, from Rosa Parks to Emmett Till, are also often recalled and honored. With -- too often -- one exception: Viola Liuzzo, who also died at 39 and who remains perhaps the most enigmatic of the heroes of what was, really, the second American Revolution. The sociologists who strive to put us into neat boxes never would have seen her as a civil rights activist -- a housewife with five kids who grew up in the South, moved to Detroit and married a Teamsters business agent. With that background, she might have been a member of Richard Nixon's silent majority. But she was different. "The thing was, she cared about everybody," her youngest son, Tony Liuzzo, said. "She was a liberated woman ahead of her time." Thirty-three years ago this week, she pointed her 1963 Oldsmobile south. King was leading a march in which 25,000 people would walk from Selma to Montgomery, George Wallace's capital. How different a time that was. What the demonstrators wanted was, simply, what Thomas Jefferson had wanted: the right to vote. If you were black, you could get killed in Alabama for even daring to try to exercise democracy's most fundamental right. Viola Liuzzo thought that was outrageous. For whatever reason, she always had a hard time with injustice and inequality. "She was always bringing home down-and-out people she met and they'd rip us off and dad would get mad," Tony chuckled. So she went down to do something, anything, to help. When the march was over, she volunteered to drive a carload of foot-sore folks back to Selma. She dropped them off, and before returning to Montgomery, called home and talked to her little boy. "She said, 'I'm coming home, Nino. I'll be leaving tomorrow,' " Tony remembers. He went to bed, only to be awakened an hour later by his sister Penny's screams. Viola Liuzzo's Michigan license plates made her an easy target for the Klansmen who saw and chased her on that lonely highway, until one of them fired a shot into the base of her brain and killed her almost instantly. That was March 25, 1965. She was the only white woman killed in the civil rights wars, and the shot has been working through her family ever since. Anthony Liuzzo, her 51-year-old husband, turned to the bottle to complete the job on him. No one told little Tony how to cope. "Nowadays they'd have support groups, everything else. They didn't do that then. There was a lot of denial." Not to mention hate. Eventually he got his life together. Other shocks followed, revelations that J. Edgar Hoover's FBI tried to smear his mother, claiming that she was a drug user "necking" with the scared black teenager in the car when she died. Three Klansmen were arrested and eventually did time for "violating Viola Liuzzo's civil rights" by blowing her brains out. Murder convictions of whites for killing blacks were impossible in the terrorist states of that day. The lizards were caught, thanks to an FBI informer, Gary Thomas Rowe, also in the car that night. Why, one might wonder, would an FBI man not lift a finger to stop a murder? Years went by before the Liuzzo kids learned that two of the Klansmen testified it was the FBI informant who actually killed their mother. Wouldn't you expect them to say that? Yes. But they took lie detector tests, and an expert said they were telling the truth. Rowe denied it &emdash; but admitted on ABC-TV he had beaten up other civil rights demonstrators. "I was a hell of a man back then," he bragged. Tony's family sued the government for negligence but lost. To this day, he remains convinced that Rowe murdered his mother. But what matters more to him is that Viola Liuzzo's place in history be recognized. For her death was not in vain. The cold-blooded murder of a middle-class Midwestern mother had a swift and dramatic effect on public opinion. Within weeks, the Voting Rights Act swept to passage in Congress. Hundreds of thousands of blacks gained the power of the vote, and white resistance to equality &emdash; at least at the ballot box &emdash; crumbled. Policies moderated, as smarter white politicians realized repression and murder were not the best tactics for winning black votes. Yet today, the woman who drove from Detroit and died for freedom is scarcely remembered, even in her hometown. The small park named for her, near Eight Mile and Greenfield, is in sad shape. Her family thinks there should be a statue. Why don't we do more to remember this rather mysterious woman who honored us all by leaving her comfortable Detroit home to help people of another color far away, simply because she thought it was the right thing to do? That got her terror and death on a country road, something she had to have known was possible. What she doesn't deserve is to be
forgotten.
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Detroit's forgotten heroine