From Selma to Minneapolis

"On March 16, 1965, a thirty-nine-year-old woman named Viola Liuzzo got into a late-model Oldsmobile and drove eight hundred miles from her home in Detroit, Michigan, to Selma, Alabama. Days earlier, following the Bloody Sunday protests, where voting-rights demonstrators had been tear-gassed and beaten, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., had issued an appeal to people of conscience across the country to come to Alabama and participate in what had already become one of the most consequential theatres in the movement for equality."

"On March 25th, the third attempt at marching from Selma to Montgomery, the state capital, proved successful, and King delivered one of his least noted but most significant speeches on the ways in which disenfranchising Black voters had been key to gutting interracial progressive politics across the South. "Racial segregation," King pointed out, "did not come about as a natural result of hatred between the races immediately after the Civil War." Rather, he argued, it had evolved as part of a larger campaign to destroy the nascent alliance between former slaves and dispossessed whites that emerged during Reconstruction."

"Afterward, Liuzzo, who'd volunteered to transport activists between the two cities, drove toward Montgomery with Leroy Moton, a nineteen-year-old Black organizer. They never made it. Liuzzo's car was intercepted by one carrying four men associated with the Ku Klux Klan. Bullets were fired into Liuzzo's car, killing her. Moton, covered in Liuzzo's blood, pretended to be dead, then set off to find help after the men departed."

Viola Liuzzo drove eight hundred miles from Detroit to Selma to join efforts after Bloody Sunday and volunteered to transport activists during the Selma-to-Montgomery marches. She arranged child care for her five children before leaving. On March 25 the third march reached Montgomery and King emphasized that disenfranchising Black voters had been central to undermining interracial progressive politics in the South. Liuzzo drove toward Montgomery with Leroy Moton, a nineteen-year-old Black organizer. Their car was intercepted by a vehicle carrying four men associated with the Ku Klux Klan; bullets killed Liuzzo and Moton feigned death before seeking help.

Read at The New Yorker