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
Read more about this topic: United Klans Of America
Famous quotes containing the word murder:
“Lizzie Borden took an axe
And gave her mother forty whacks;
When she saw what she had done,
She gave her father forty-one.”
—Anonymous. Late 19th century ballad.
The quatrain refers to the famous case of Lizzie Borden, tried for the murder of her father and stepmother on Aug. 4, 1892, in Fall River, Massachusetts. Though she was found innocent, there were many who contested the verdict, occasioning a prodigious output of articles and books, including, most recently, Frank Spiering’s Lizzie (1985)