On March 16, 1965, a thirty-nine-year-old woman named Viola Liuzzo got into a late-model Oldsmobile and drove eight hundred miles from her home in Detroit, Michigan, to Selma, Alabama. Days earlier, following the Bloody Sunday protests, where voting-rights demonstrators had been tear-gassed and beaten, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., had issued an appeal to people of conscience across the country to come to Alabama and participate in what had already become one of the most consequential theatres in the movement for equality. Liuzzo, a white woman who’d been born in Pennsylvania, moved to Michigan, where she eventually married an official with the Teamsters and became active in the Detroit N.A.A.C.P. She told her family and friends that she felt compelled to do something about the situation in Alabama, arranged child care for her five children, and drove south.
On March 25th, the third attempt at marching from Selma to Montgomery, the state capital, proved successful, and King delivered one of his least noted but most significant speeches on the ways in which disenfranchising Black voters had been key to gutting interracial progressive politics across the South. “Racial segregation,” King pointed out, “did not come about as a natural result of hatred between the races immediately after the Civil War.” Rather, he argued, it had evolved as part of a larger campaign to destroy the nascent alliance between former slaves and dispossessed whites that emerged during Reconstruction. Afterward, Liuzzo, who’d volunteered to transport activists between the two cities, drove toward Montgomery with Leroy Moton, a nineteen-year-old Black organizer. They never made it. Liuzzo’s car was intercepted by one carrying four men associated with the Ku Klux Klan. Bullets were fired into Liuzzo’s car, killing her. Moton, covered in Liuzzo’s blood, pretended to be dead, then set off to find help after the men departed.
The murder sent shock waves through the movement and across the nation. The civil-rights workers Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, and Michael Schwerner had been murdered in Philadelphia, Mississippi, the previous summer, and that February, Jimmie Lee Jackson, a twenty-six-year-old marcher, was fatally shot by an Alabama state trooper after a voting-rights demonstration. Two weeks before Liuzzo was attacked, the Reverend James Reeb, a Unitarian minister and a member of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference from Boston who also volunteered in the voting-rights campaign, had been beaten to death. Nonetheless, Liuzzo’s death—and, specifically, the fact that the movement’s antagonists were willing to kill a white woman—pointed to a broader conclusion. Forces arrayed against the movement did not simply represent a threat to African Americans, as was the popular perception. They were a mortal danger to anyone who disagreed with them, regardless of the person’s race, background, or gender.