The Murder of Viola Liuzzo
In 1965, 39-year-old Viola Liuzzo, a white woman from the North, decided to go help support racial equality in the South. She drove down to Alabama and assisted the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in driving civil rights marchers back and forth, from Montgomery, Alabama to Selma, Alabama, where the marches were taking place. On March 25, 1965, as she was making her last trip to Montgomery with 19-year-old African American Leroy Moton to go pick up the marchers, four members of the UKA saw Liuzzo sitting at a red light with Leroy in the car with her. They followed her in their car, eventually driving up beside her, and shot at the car. Leroy survived the shots after pretending to be dead, but Liuzzo did not make it. Collie Wilkins, William Orville Eaton, Eugene Thomas, and Gary Thomas Rowe were taken into custody the next day. Wilkins, Eaton, and Thomas each received 10-year prison sentences, while Rowe turned out to be an undercover agent for the FBI
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Famous quotes containing the word murder:
“There’s in people simply an urge to destroy, an urge to kill, to murder and rage, and until all mankind, without exception, undergoes a great change, wars will be waged, everything that has been built up, cultivated, and grown will be destroyed and disfigured, after which mankind will have to begin all over again.”
—Anne Frank (1929–1945)