Push continues to honor California, Pa., native and civil rights martyr Viola Liuzzo in hometown
March 25 marked 56 years since 39-year-old civil rights activist Viola Liuzzo was violently gunned down in Selma, Ala., by Ku Klux Klan members while driving fellow supporters of Martin Luther King Jr.’s equality efforts to the Montgomery airport.
Liuzzo has the distinction of being the only white woman acknowledged as a civil rights martyr. Her death is believed to have directly contributed to the passage of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits racial discrimination in voting. President Lyndon B. Johnson signed that legislation into law on Aug. 6, 1965, only a few months after Liuzzo’s murder.
Her story has been memorialized in many forms over the years, including her name being engraved on the National Civil Rights Memorial in Birmingham, Ala., being featured in the 2004 documentary “Home of the Brave,” and a statue of Liuzzo being erected in
Detroit, where she was living when she made that fateful Alabama trip to help coordinate and participate in civil rights marches from Selma to Montgomery.
Here’s what many folks probably don’t know about Liuzzo: She was born in California, Pa., and spent most of her formative years in the Keystone State. There’s now an ongoing campaign in place led by local nonprofit California Area re:Generations (CARE) to secure Liuzzo a memorial in her hometown and preserve the memory of an influential local icon.
“She didn’t leave Detroit and travel to Selma to be a martyr,” said CARE chairwoman Rosemary Capanna. “She was someone who saw injustice and wanted to do her part to try to right it. That’s a compelling story.”
It amazes Ms. Capanna that
longtime California residents don’t know about the Liuzzo connection. She chalks that up to a combination of no historical markers in the area to indicate it’s Liuzzo’s birthplace and deliberate attempts by the FBI in the ’60s to discredit Liuzzo as a junkie and racial philanderer to distract from the fact one of the agency’s undercover informants was in the KKK car that shot at her in Alabama and did nothing to stop her killing.
There’s a chance that her story may be more widely known soon enough now that Entertainment Studios Motion Pictures has acquired the worldwide media rights to historian Mary Stanton’s biography “From Selma to Sorrow: The Life and Death of Viola Liuzzo,” according to Deadline. For now, though, a memorial will have to do. The Pennsylvania Historical and
Museum Commission recently rejected CARE’s application for a Liuzzo historical marker in California, but Ms. Capanna still is going to continue her push to ensure Liuzzo’s sacrifice isn’t soon forgotten.
“We have plans to memorialize her here,” she said. “We are moving forward. She’s too important to ignore.”
This push to memorialize Liuzzo has the blessing of Mary Liuzzo Lilleboe, Viola’s 73-year-old daughter. Although Ms. Liuzzo Lilleboe currently lives in southern Oregon and grew up in Detroit, she said that her family used to spend summers visiting her father’s family in Carbondale, Pa.
Ms. Liuzzo Lilleboe remembered her mother as being very involved in her and her siblings’ development.
She described her mother as fun, always singing and never imposing her ideas on her children. Rather, she’d ask them questions to help them come to their own conclusions, including the time she made a 14-year-old Mary wonder how she would feel if there weren’t only pretty white girls in the Seventeen magazine she was reading.
She was only 17 when her mother went to Alabama and never came back. She said she still can’t go down South without folks immediately just wanting to hug her upon hearing that she’s related to Liuzzo.
“My mother wanted a better world,” she said. “She wanted a world where justice and equality prevail and every human being has the right to reach their highest potential.”
If all goes well, the memorial to Liuzzo would go either near her childhood home in California or somewhere on the campus of California Universityof Pennsylvania.
Regardless of where it ends up, it would make Ms. Liuzzo Lilleboe happy if the final product inspires those who live there and anyone just passing through to research her mother’s life and legacy.
“One of the most important and valuable things we have is our history,” she said. “To be able to go to a town and have a place of history somehow makes the history real. ... It means a whole lot to me and my family that the residents of the area value their connection to my mother.”