"One Woman's Life"

READING

Viola Liuzzo, a Unitarian Universalist, was killed in 1965, while transporting a civil rights worker on the road from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama. She had traveled to Alabama from her home in Detroit, Michigan, moved to action by the tragedy and injustice of the first march, which became known as Bloody Sunday. "I am no longer able to sit by while my people are suffering," she wrote. "I examined carefully my own possible reaction if I were one of the Selma victims, not just a spectator."[1]

She confided in her friend and housekeeper, Sarah Evans, an African American woman she had known for years, that she planned to go to Selma. Sarah "told her she was crazy, that she would wind up getting herself killed," writes Liuzzo's biographer Mary Stanton. "But [she] was stubborn. . . Then Viola told Sarah "how much it meant for her to do something concrete with her life and that she thought the civil rights movement would give her that opportunity. 'It's important,' she said, 'and I want to be part of it.'" [2]

Just a few days later, she was dead, the victim of a vicious shooting by four members of the Ku Klux Klan.

According to Sara Bullard, "After Viola Liuzzo was killed, [her husband] Jim and [her five] children also became victims. They were besieged with hate mail and phone threats. The Klan circulated ugly lies about Mrs. Liuzzo's character, and these were repeated in FBI reports. Though they were proven false, the rumors fueled sentiment among some that Mrs. Liuzzo was out of 'her place' in Selma, that she should have stayed home with her children. A "Ladies Home Journal" survey showed that only 26 percent of readers approved of Mrs. Liuzzo's mission in Selma.

"Three Klansmen - Eugene Thomas, William Orville Eaton, and Collie LeRoy Wilkins Jr. - were indicted for the murder of Viola Liuzzo. The state had a strong case: the fourth Klansmen in the car, Gary Thomas Rowe Jr., was an FBI informant and he had seen everything. The Klan's attorney defended his clients by delivering a violent harangue against the murder victim herself. The case ended in a hung jury. During the retrial, a second all-white jury deliberated less than two hours before finding the Klansmen not guilty.

"Many people, including some federal officials, were becoming frustrated at the consistent failure of Southern juries to convict civil rights opponents. In an unusual move, the U.S. Justice Department decided to bring federal charges against [the three Klansmen] for conspiring to violate the civil rights of Mrs. Liuzzo. A federal jury found the Klansmen guilty, and [an] Alabama federal district judge handed down the maximum prison sentence of 10 years for each defendant. The Liuzzo case became known as a milestone in the history of Southern justice."[3]

[1] "From Selma to Sorrow: The Life and Death of Viola Liuzzo," by Mary Stanton (Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1998)

[2] Ibid.

[3] "Free at Last: A History of the Civil Rights Movement and Those Who Died in the Struggle," by Sara Bullard (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993)

SERMON

Viola Liuzzo had a good idea of the risk she took when she left her home in Detroit to join the civil rights marchers in Selma. Having grown up in Georgia, she knew what it was like to live in a segregated society. She understood the depth of prejudice and fear.

Yet all her life she stood up for other people, often without calculating the cost. She was easily outraged and moved to action. As early as age six, Viola Liuzzo earned punishment from her mother for stealing money to give to a poor black child.

Viola Liuzzo became sensitized to racial injustice in the north when she moved to Detroit at the age of eighteen, during the Second World War. Racial turbulence there made Detroit a dangerous place, but jobs were available for women workers. Liuzzo worked, and married, and started a family while she was still very young.

By the time Viola Liuzzo was thirty-three, she was the full-time mother of five. But she was never a conventional mother.

Her closest friend, Sarah Evans, was also her housekeeper. Sarah Evans was African American. Their friendship drew Viola Liuzzo into the civil rights movement. They joined the Detroit chapter of the NAACP together. They traveled to New York together to attend a civil rights conference sponsored by the Unitarian Universalist church and held at the United Nations. Sarah Evans recalled, "She always spoke out for what she believed in. 'Sarah,' she'd say, 'you and I are going to change the world. One day they'll write about us. You'll see.'"

Sarah Evans was a loyal friend. After Viola Liuzzo's death, she helped her grieving husband raise their children. The families remain close to this day. And Sarah Evans did live to see Viola Liuzzo become part of history.

Being part of history, however, is an ambiguous legacy. Especially if you leave five children behind. The Viola Liuzzo case became a milestone in the history of civil rights, but justice has not always been done to her story.

Viola Liuzzo was the victim of a violent hate crime. She was also the victim of a campaign to discredit her reputation and question her motivation for going to Alabama. She had a powerful advocate, President Lyndon Johnson, and loving supporters, Sarah Evans and her family, but even they could not dispel the rumors that circulated about her.

Her death, on an empty stretch of highway twenty miles from Selma, was no mystery, but raised questions about her anyway. She was driving a young black man back to Montgomery after he had borrowed her car to shuttle marchers between the two cities. Klansmen looking for a target spotted them together. They chased her car, fired several shots, and drove her off the road. Viola Liuzzo died; her passenger did not. He and the FBI agent in the Klan car were able to report everything that happened.

Judging by the poll from the "Ladies Home Journal," many found it difficult to sympathize with Viola Liuzzo. Why had she left her five children and driven, all by herself, from Detroit to Selma? The questions suggested that she was impulsive and irresponsible.

The Sheriff of Selma, Jim Clark, told a reporter from the "Detroit News," Viola Liuzzo's home newspaper, "I have five children too. But the night this happened my wife was at home with the children where she belongs." And it wasn't just a southern sheriff who blamed the victim. FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover told President Johnson that Jim Liuzzo, Viola's husband and a Teamster organizer, had a "shady background." He also said "that Viola Liuzzo had been sitting 'very very close' to the [black man] in the car." Mary Stanton adds, "When Johnson ignored his innuendoes, Hoover instructed FBI staff to leak his speculations to Klan informants, who then leaked them to the press." Viola Liuzzo's husband and children "were besieged with hate mail and phone threats," writes Sara Bullard. Though her family sought an apology from the FBI for years, they have never received one.

Five hundred Unitarian Universalists, including Viola Liuzzo, responded to Dr. Martin Luther King's call to Selma. Three thousand people marched together in that historic demonstration. One woman gave her life. But her decision and its tragic outcome have been investigated, Mary Stanton writes, "as if she had been a criminal herself." That is how one woman's life was tarnished, when it should have been celebrated.

Slowly, over time, the truth has prevailed. In 1982, the Reverend Joseph Lowrey, president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, addressed a crowd gathered at the place on the highway where Viola Liuzzo had died. Laying a wreath on the ground, he said, "Seventeen years ago a brave, gallant woman defied the traditions and chains of segregation and discrimination. She knew that injustice anywhere was fatal to justice everywhere. Our presence here testifies that her light still shines." Today, if you visit the Unitarian Universalist Association headquarters in Boston, you can see a Selma Memorial plaque, honoring the three people who died there during the march: Jimmy Lee Jackson, James Reeb, and Viola Liuzzo.

Viola Liuzzo's life is one to remember for her commitment and her courage. It is also a life to remind us of the very real sacrifices a mother makes, whatever path she chooses. Viola Liuzzo's activism gave her family pride, but left them bereft and broken. They could not claim her legacy without a battle with the Klan, the courts, and the FBI.

Her daughter, Penny Liuzzo Herrington, told Mary Stanton, "Mom was for real. . . . She believed in social justice and wanted to help black people get it. Am I proud of her? Sure, of course. But mostly I miss her. It would've been great to have her around to talk to when I was in my twenties or thirties, when I would have appreciated her more. You know what I mean? I'm angry sometimes because she's gone and I missed so much of her."

At the same time, Penny Liuzzo Herrington gladly visits high school social studies classes to speak about her mother and about the civil rights movement. "I'm proud of what she did. My boys are too. She was a strong person."

But Penny Liuzzo Herrington adds, "I also think about whether I could have done what Mom did. I have four children, and when I ask myself if I could have left them the answer is always no. I don't have the confidence she had, I guess. She was always so sure about everything."

What made Viola Liuzzo so sure of the choice she made is something we can only guess. The person who knew her best, her friend Sarah Evans, said, "If you don't have the right kind of heart you can't understand her. I won't ever believe that all white people are bad because I knew her."

Viola Liuzzo had asked Sarah to take care of her children if anything ever happened to her. Sarah Evans agreed. When Viola Liuzzo died, Sarah and her grandson, Tyrone, lived with the Liuzzo family, and she raised the children until they left home. One of the children's children is named Sarah; they all call her "grandma."

One evening a while back, around the anniversary of the march on Selma, I was watching the news on television and I caught an interview with Sarah Evans. She is still alive today, a woman in her nineties. She spoke about her friendship with Viola Liuzzo, and about raising her children after she died. Listening to this strong, warm woman speak about her bond to the Liuzzo family, I realized that Viola Liuzzo's story should be told again - not just because of who she was, but because of the friend she made. Viola Liuzzo's sacrifice moved the civil rights movement forward, but the loss her family suffered would have been irredeemable, had it not been for Sarah Evans. The story of one woman's life is not just about one woman, after all. It is also about the deep bond she shared with another woman, also a mother, and the choices each one made out of loyalty to her friend. Each of them lived, by the commitments they made and the consequences of them. Each life was a self-expenditure, notable for the ideals and loyalties that called them. May we remember each woman for her commitment and her sacrifice, for each served, in her own way, the cause of justice.

References used to prepare this sermon include "From Selma to Sorrow: The Life and Death of Viola Liuzzo," by Mary Stanton (Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1998) and "Free at Last: A History of the Civil Rights Movement and Those Who Died in the Struggle," by Sara Bullard (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). A biography of Viola Liuzzo can be found at http://www.uua.org/uuhs/duub/articles/violaliuzzo.html.