repetition: ‘How long? Not long, because no lie can live forever. How long?
Not long, because you will reap what you sow. How long? Not long. Because
the arm of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.’ Although
Wallace’s troopers refused the marchers’ voting rights petition, the Selma
march was the capstone of the civil rights movement. ‘We Have Overcome
Today,’ the joyous crowd sang.
Tragedy struck hours after King’s speech, eliminating any doubt that a vot-
ing rights law was needed. Birmingham klansmen chased down Viola Liuzzo,
a red-haired mother of five who was married to a Detroit union official. As
an NAACP member, she volunteered to use her car to shuttle civil rights
workers through ‘Bloody Lowndes’ county between Selma and Montgomery.
The klansmen were enraged that Liuzzo violated a southern taboo by letting
a young black male, Leroy Moton, ride with her. Traveling at 90 m.p.h.,
the klansmen pulled their red-and-white Chevrolet alongside Liuzzo’s
Oldsmobile and shot her in the face. Her car kept rolling for a while, but the
killer assured another klansman: ‘Baby Brother, don’t worry about it. That
bitch and that bastard are dead and in hell. I don’t miss.’ Liuzzo was indeed
dead while a blood-splattered Moton survived by pretending to be dead.
In an especially shameful episode, it was the dead woman and the move-
ment she died for that were put on trial. One of the klansmen in the car was
FBI informant Tommy Rowe, who forewarned of violence the very day
Liuzzo died but had not tried to stop the murder. An embarrassed FBI cov-
ered its incompetence by branding the victim as an adulterer, criminal, and
drug addict. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover told president Johnson that Liuzzo
sat ‘very, very close to the Negro’ in the car, giving ‘all the appearances of a
necking party.’ Sheriff Clark contacted the Michigan police to undertake a
background check on Liuzzo. Clark passed along the gossip that surfaced to
the Alabama Klan. State officials commissioned a hack writer and a Dallas
film company to prepare lurid exposés of the alleged debaucheries commit-
ted on the Selma march. In court, the Klan’s attorney called Liuzzo ‘a white
nigger’ who ‘turned her car over to a black nigger’ for the purpose of ‘haulin’
niggers and Communists back and forth.’ The real culprit, he alleged, was
Moton, who shot Liuzzo to steal her purse. Despite Rowe’s eyewitness testi-
mony, a state jury acquitted the murderers. Only in federal court were the
killers found guilty, not of murder but of violating Liuzzo’s civil rights, and
given a maximum 10-year jail sentence.
The Selma march pressured both political parties to approve a Voting
Rights Act that would enforce the 15th Amendment. President Johnson wor-
ried that his health care bill might be derailed if he kept dismantling Jim
Crow, but he pressed hard for black voting rights when public opinion polls
showed 75 per cent of Americans supported it. Even senator Harry Byrd of
Virginia – the guiding force behind Massive Resistance – conceded. ‘You can’t122 THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT
Liuzzo, Viola(1925–65):
White Detroit mother
murdered by klansmen
for helping the Selma
march.