The city of Detroit will unveil a street sign Saturday honoring Viola Liuzzo, the white Detroit mother of five who was killed by Ku Klux Klan members in Alabama after responding to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s call to support the Selma voting rights movement in 1965.
The sign will be installed at Pembroke Avenue and Mansfield Street on the city’s west side during an 11 a.m. public ceremony hosted by the Pembroke Academy National Blue Ribbon School Community and Detroit City Councilwoman Angela Whitfield-Calloway.
Organizers say the event is meant to honor “the legacy of civil rights activist Viola Liuzzo” and invite the public to “commemorate a hero’s legacy and celebrate a shared commitment to justice and equality.”
The tribute adds to Detroit’s ongoing efforts to preserve Liuzzo’s legacy. In September 2023, the city partnered with the Viola Liuzzo Park Association to unveil a civil rights memorial monument at Viola Liuzzo Playground on the city’s west side, honoring Liuzzo, her friend Sarah Evans, and others connected to the struggle for voting rights.
Liuzzo was 39 when she drove from Detroit to Selma after watching the violence of Bloody Sunday, when voting rights marchers were beaten and tear-gassed by Alabama state troopers. Appalled by the brutality and inspired by King’s call for people to come south and help, she left behind her husband and five children and joined the historic march from Selma to Montgomery.
After the march, Liuzzo volunteered to shuttle activists and fellow supporters between Montgomery and Selma. On March 25, 1965, while driving with Leroy Moton, a young Black activist, she was chased along Highway 80 in Lowndes County by Klansmen, who pulled alongside her car and opened fire, killing her. Moton survived by pretending to be dead and later testified against the men involved.
Her killing shocked the nation. Liuzzo is widely remembered as the only known white woman murdered in the South during the civil rights movement. Her death helped reveal how far white supremacy would go to silence anyone who challenged it
Her family later became the target of relentless racist harassment. A cross was burned on their lawn, bullets were fired into their home, and the Liuzzo children were taunted with slurs and had rocks thrown at them on their way to school.
In the days after her murder, the FBI spread false rumors about her character, helping to obscure the fact that a bureau informant, Gary Thomas Rowe, was in the car with the Klansmen involved in the killing. Years later, records obtained by Liuzzo’s children helped expose the campaign against her.
In the first criminal case stemming from the murder, Collie Leroy Wilkins Jr. was acquitted by an all-white jury in Alabama after the first state trial ended in a hung jury. Following the acquittal, the federal government took over the case and charged Wilkins, William Eaton, and Eugene Thomas with conspiracy to intimidate African Americans under the 1871 Ku Klux Klan Act, a Reconstruction era civil rights statute. They were convicted and sentenced to 10 years in prison.
In the decades since her murder, Liuzzo has come to symbolize the moral courage of a white Detroiter who understood that the fight for Black freedom was also her fight.
That is part of why her story still resonates today, at a time when many white Americans have again been showing up alongside marginalized communities, including in protests over police brutality and aggressive immigration enforcement and detention plans. In recent years, racial justice demonstrations have also drawn large, multiracial groups.
Liuzzo’s life is a reminder that solidarity can come at a cost and that real change often requires people who decide that silence is not an option.
As MLK once said, “He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.”
Saturday’s ceremony will honor that legacy in a city that understands struggle but has never given up on justice, equality, and a better life.
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