Christal Rice Cooper
This
was originally published on February 6, 2014 in the Winston-Salem Journal
Copyright
granted by Terri Kirby Erickson
Guest
Blogger Terri Kirby Erickson:
on
her poem “Leroy and Viola”
and
the history behind it.
From
the moment I read John Railey’s column last year about people martyred during
the struggle for civil rights, I was intrigued as well as outraged by a brief
reference to 19-year-old African-American civil rights worker, Leroy Moton, and
Viola Gregg Liuzzo, a white, middle-aged housewife and mother from Detroit.
There
are uplifting stories from this tumultuous period in our nation's history, but
mostly darker tales — the kind that will haunt us forever. This story, I'm
afraid, is one of them. It begins with the everyday image of two people driving
down a long stretch of highway, listening to the radio. It ends, for one of
them, with sudden and devastating violence.
On the evening of March 25, 1965,
after a march in Montgomery, Ala., Liuzzo — a proud member of the NAACP — was
giving Moton a ride back to Selma.
At
some point in their journey, armed Klansmen spied this lone white woman driving
a car with Michigan plates and her black male passenger. They were so enraged
by this "outsider" and the appearance of "race mixing," they
began to give chase. By some accounts, both cars were soon traveling at speeds
of 100 miles per hour.
When
the gunmen were able to get close enough to Liuzzo's vehicle, they shot her
twice in the head. The car careened into a ditch and Moton, covered in Liuzzo's
blood, pretended to be dead — the only reason this young man survived to tell
the world what happened.
It
is hard to imagine the terror he must have felt when that quartet of killers
gathered around the wreckage, searching for survivors. For Leroy Moton to
"play dead" so convincingly (beside the bloody corpse of a woman who
had been vibrantly alive only seconds before), is a testimony to his survival
skills, not to mention the bravery already evidenced by the choice he made to
march for civil rights in the segregated South.
Eventually,
three of Viola Liuzzo's murderers were brought to trial. In the Encyclopedia of
Alabama (published October 24, 2007), the author writes that the Klansmen were
acquitted the first time around, after rumor and innuendo did their work to
destroy Liuzzo's reputation. Some even hinted that Liuzzo and Moton had a
romantic relationship — damaging not only because Liuzzo was a married woman
and the mother of five children, but because it was still illegal in many parts
of the country, including Alabama, for whites and non-whites to cohabitate or
engage in sexual acts.
As
it turned out, the fourth man involved in the shooting was a "paid FBI
informant" and the charges against him were dropped. There were subsequent
trials, according to the EOA, wherein "Alabama juries" continued to
"clear" the Klansmen. Federal juries finally convicted them of
"violating Liuzzo's civil rights," and "sentenced the men to ten
years in prison." One "died in March, 1966, before beginning his
sentence," and "the FBI informant was granted full immunity and
placed in the federal witness protection program."
There
is speculation that the FBI, under orders from Bureau Director J. Edgar Hoover,
was responsible for the smear campaign against Viola Liuzzo. Some even say it
was the FBI informant who pulled the trigger. But this fact is indisputable:
Viola Liuzzo and far too many others, black and white, made the ultimate
sacrifice in the fight for equal rights.
Liuzzo's
murder did, however, "move President Johnson to order a federal
investigation of the Klan, and to petition Congress to expand the Federal
Conspiracy Act of 1870 to make the murder of civil rights activists a federal
crime. Her death increased congressional support for the passage of the Voting
Rights Act, which Johnson signed on August 6, 1965."
The
EOA goes on to say that "in 1989, Viola Liuzzo became one of forty
civil-rights martyrs whose lives were commemorated on the Civil Rights Memorial
in Montgomery. In 1991, the Women of the Southern Christian Leadership
Conference erected a stone marker on Highway 80 at the spot where she was
murdered."
As
for Leroy Moton, he is still with us. I have had the privilege of corresponding
with him on a few occasions, and was able to tell him how much I respect and
admire him. Both he and the late Viola Liuzzo, as well as scores of other
champions for civil rights, are an inspiration.
It is important to continue sharing their
stories, and to honor these brave men and women who sacrificed so much in
pursuit of justice for all.
Leroy and Viola
Come Saturday morning, poor black men
gathered on street corners, waiting for white
men in Cadillacs to drive by slow, shouting
hey boy from their rolled-down windows, get
in, which meant there was a job digging ditches
or other backbreaking work for less money
than it cost to feed the family dog. Nights
were harder, what with hooded gangs of racists
wrapped in bed sheets roaming the countryside,
and woe to anybody who wasn’t white once
those half-drunk, hatemongering mobs with
their burning crosses and lengths of rope,
arrived on the scene. So in 1965 when married
mother-of-five Viola Gregg Liuzzo volunteered
to drive nineteen-year-old Leroy Moton back
to Selma—both fresh from a freedom march
in Montgomery, Alabama—the sight of a white
woman with a black man in the front seat of
a vehicle sporting Michigan plates didn’t sit
well with Klansmen who were, as usual, wild
as pent-up ponies in a barn blaze. So they chased
the pair down and fired two bullets into Liuzzo’s
brain, laughing like loons when the car careened
into a ditch. Covered in blood, Moton played
dead—surviving the shots, the crash, and the killers’
swift perusal of the wreckage. But Viola Liuzzo
is gone except in memory, where the same reel
runs over and over in Leroy Moton’s mind:
a pretty woman’s profile, pale as milk against
the purpling sky, and his hand, dark as rivers
on the radio dial—strangers joined forever
by history, seconds before the slaughter.
Excerpt from A Lake of Light
and Clouds
Press 53
© Terri Kirby Erickson 2014
© Terri Kirby Erickson 2014
Terri Kirby
Erickson is the author of four
collections of poetry, including In the Palms of Angels (Press 53, 2011),
winner of three international awards, and her latest collection, A Lake of
Light and Clouds (Press 53, 2014). Telling Tales of Dusk (Press
53, 2009) was #23 on the Poetry Foundation Contemporary Best Seller List in
2010. Her work has won numerous awards, and has appeared in the 2013 Poet’s
Market, The Christian Science Monitor, North Carolina Literary
Review, Storysouth, JAMA, Verse Daily, and many other
publications, and has twice been chosen by former U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser
for inclusion in his American Life in Poetry column, sponsored by The
Poetry Foundation and the Library of Congress. She is a member of Delta Kappa
Gamma Society International, a professional organization of women educators,
and has taught a number of poetry classes in public schools, universities, and
other venues.
