Civil rights martyr was a Washington County native
Courtesy of Sally Liuzzo-Prado
This photo shows four of the five Liuzzo children after hearing of Viola Liuzzo’s death. From left are Tony, Sally, Penny and Tommy. Mary Liuzzo was with her grandparents in Georgia.
Viola Liuzzo
A mob lined the streets shouting racial slurs and throwing rocks at Sally Liuzzo-Prado when she and her four siblings walked to school for the first time after the funeral for their mother, who was murdered by the Ku Klux Klan in 1965.
Liuzzo-Prado was 6 years old at the time and thought the people along the three blocks separating her home in Detroit from her school were making fun of her because the polish was coming off of her shoes.
“It was terrifying to live through it,” she said, while discussing what followed after her mother, Viola Fauver Gregg Liuzzo, was shot to death for driving a black man, Leroy Moton, 19, in her white 1963 Oldsmobile from Selma to Montgomery, Ala., during one of the nation’s ugliest civil rights struggles.
Her mother was born Viola Gregg on April 11, 1925, in California Borough, a little-known local occurrence until a Mon Valley woman set out several years ago to find the home where Liuzzo was born.
“I don’t remember anyone discussing her,” said Rosemary Capana, a California web designer and author. “I started Googling and was fascinated that she was born in Pennsylvania.”
Capana said she suspects the house where Viola Gregg was born sat along Park Street and was demolished in an expansion of the California University of Pennsylvania campus, somewhere in the vicinity of Louis L. Manderino Library.
Viola was a daughter of Eva Wilson, a schoolteacher, and Herbert Ernest Gregg, a coal miner and World War I veteran. The family had moved to Charleroi by 1930, according to that year’s census. When Viola was young, her family relocated to Tennessee and a life of poverty after her father lost his right hand in a mining accident.
“They were destitute,” Liuzzo-Prado said. “As a kid, mom never had a Christmas.”
Liuzzo-Prado said her family’s history in the Mon Valley is “kind of a blank spot,” as her mother’s sister didn’t remember anything about living there.
Liuzzo’s family moved to Detroit, and at age 16, she followed them there to become a wartime defense industry worker. Eventually she married Anthony James Liuzzo, a Teamsters union representative.
Following the killing of a black protester during a voting rights demonstration in February 1965 in Marion, Ala., Martin Luther King Jr. organized a protest march the following month from Selma to the state capital of Montgomery. Alabama state troopers assaulted the marchers March 7, 1965, as more than 500 of them attempted to cross Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge in a day that became etched in American history as Bloody Sunday. The march was halted. The scene shocked the country and would become the impetus for the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
King, following Bloody Sunday, urged ministers and others across the United States to come to Selma to again undertake the 54-mile march to Montgomery, and Viola heeded the call along with nearly 3,000 other protesters. On March 25, 1965, the walk was completed.
Later in the evening, Liuzzo was driving Moton along Route 80 when a vehicle pulled alongside her car and one of its passengers opened fire, delivering a fatal wound to her head. Moton pretended to be dead in order to survive.
President Johnson appeared on television the following day to announce that her murderers had been arrested. They were Eugene Thomas, Collie Leroy Wilkins Jr., William O. Eaton and Gary Thomas Rowe, who would eventually be identified as an FBI informant. Rowe was entered into a witness protection program. Wilkins and Thomas were each sentenced to 10 years in prison. Eaton died before his sentencing.
Back in Detroit, nearly 350 attended Liuzzo’s funeral, and among the mourners were King and Jimmy Hoffa, president of the Teamsters union.
Her mother, Eva Gregg, said her daughter was an honor student at Carnegie Institute of Technology in Michigan, according to a March 26, 1965, story about Liuzzo’s birthplace that appeared in The Valley Independent.
“She was tender toward anyone in distress,” Gregg said.
In no time, the Liuzzo family had to deal with burning crosses on their front lawn and other forms of harassment. Liuzzo-Prado said her father pulled his children from public school, enrolled them in a private school and drove them to classes to avoid trouble. He also hired armed guards around the clock at their home.
Liuzzo-Prado said her mother’s memory is a “double-edged sword.”
“We’re so very proud of her,” she said.
Liuzzo loved taking her children for long walks in the woods, and exposing them to culture.
“She said that was more important than staying home and scrubbing floors,” Liuzzo-Prado said. “She made every holiday magic.”
Liuzzo-Prado, who lives in Tennessee, said it’s difficult to relive her family’s past, and that it causes her to suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder.
“It was a horrific thing,” she said.
She said she often speaks in public about her mother, and that she was never concerned about her safety until the rioting last year in Charlottesville.
She said Heather D. Heyer, who was there as a counterprotester and was struck and killed by a car driven into a crowd by a Nazi sympathizer, is being called a modern-day Viola Liuzzo. The driver, James Alex Fields Jr. of Ohio, is facing a first-degree homicide charge over Heyer’s death during a white pride rally that resulted in injuries to 19 others.
“To think that 53 years later we’re still going through the same similarities,” Liuzzo-Prado said. “It’s just sad. I don’t like to think that mom died in vain.”