From Selma to Sorrow: The Life and Death of Viola Liuzzo
Mary Stanton
In 1965, Detroit resident Viola Liuzzo, a white, married mother of five, traveled to Alabama to participate in the Selma to Montgomery march for voting rights. She never returned home alive. After arriving in Alabama, Liuzzo volunteered to drive demonstrators back and forth between Selma and Montgomery, the state’s capital. On the night of March 25, Liuzzo had dropped off demonstrators in Selma and was driving Leroy Moton, a black civil rights worker, back to Montgomery when a car carrying four Klansmen pulled up alongside her vehicle. Someone in the car fatally shot Liuzzo, making her the first white woman killed in the civil rights movement. In From Selma to Sorrow: The Life and Death of Viola Liuzzo, author Mary Stanton tells the story of Liuzzo’s life, her murder, and why the FBI, under the directorship of J. Edgar Hoover, spread false stories about Liuzzo to divert attention away from an FBI informant who was one of the Klansmen in the car that fateful night. (University of Georgia Press)