TEAMSTER #SHERO VIOLA LIUZZO

On March 25, 1965 Viola Liuzzo, 39 years old, was driving back from a trip shuttling fellow civil rights activists to the Montgomery airport, she was shot in the head, murdered by members of the Ku Klux Klan. The International Teamster April 1965 said this "She was murdered, as the President of the United States characterized it, “by the enemies of justice who for decades have used the rope and the gun, the tar and the feathers, to terrorize their neighbors.” Mrs. Liuzzo died trying to make an American dream come true."  She was a daughter, sister,wife, mother, friend, activist, believer who grew up in poverty, went to school in the Jim Crow south, faced many challenges but #Nevertheless #ShePersisted!  She was a woman with uncommon courage, a freedom fighting angel, a Teamsters #Shero, a Civil Rights #Shero, Everybody's #Shero!

Viola was born Viola Fauver Gregg on April 1, 1925, in the small town of California, Pennsylvania, to  Eva Wilson, a teacher, and Heber Ernest Gregg, a coal miner and World War I veteran. While on the job, in 1930,  Heber's right hand was blown off in a mine explosion, and during the Great Depression, the Greggs became solely dependent on Eva’s income.  During that time, work was very hard to come by for Eva, as she could pick up only sporadic, short-term, teaching positions.  The family decided to move, when Viola was six, to Chattanooga, Tennessee, where Eva found a teaching position.

The family was very poor and lived in one-room shacks with no running water. The schools Viola attended did not have adequate supplies. Having spent much of her childhood and adolescence poor in Tennessee, Viola experienced the segregated nature of the South firsthand. This would eventually have a powerful impact on her activism. It was during her formative years that she realized how unjust & unfair segregation and racism is, as she and her family, in similar conditions of great poverty, were still afforded social privilege and amenities denied to African Americans under the Jim Crow laws.

In 1941, the Gregg family moved to Ypsilanti, Michigan, where her father sought a job assembling bombs at the Ford Motor Company. Two years later, Viola 18yrs old, the Gregg family moved to Detroit, Michigan.  According to an article "Detroit In The 1940's" in The Atlantic "The early part of the 20th century saw the city of Detroit, Michigan, rise to prominence on the huge growth of the auto industry and related manufacturers. The 1940s were boom years of development, but the decade was full of upheaval and change, as factories re-tooled to build war machines, and women started taking on men's roles in the workplace, as men shipped overseas to fight in World War II. The need for workers brought an influx of African-Americans to Detroit, who met stiff resistance from whites who refused to welcome them into their neighborhoods or work beside them on an assembly line. A race riot took place over three days in 1943, leaving 34 dead and hundreds injured."  Witnessing these horrific ordeals was a major motivator that influenced Viola’s future civil rights work.

In 1943, Viola married George Argyris, a restaurant manager where she worked. They had two children, Penny and Evangeline Mary, and divorced in 1949.  She later married Anthony Liuzzo, a Teamster Business Agent & Organizer for Local 247 in Detroit. They had three children: Tommy, Anthony, Jr., and Sally. "She was the nature-loving mom, whose Tennessee roots inspired barefoot strolls and an insistence on exposing her kids to planetariums, rodeos, circuses and even watching their dog giving birth, so they’d appreciate the natural world. She was the caring mom who cured son Tony’s terror of the noisy trucks spraying pesticides on the neighborhood’s trees by visiting City Hall and arranging for him to ride in one. She was a fun mom." Viola as described in a Washington Post article many years after her death.

When a neighbor’s house burned down one Christmas eve, Viola after taking up a neighborhood collection, pounded on the door of a toy store owner’s home, insisting he open his shop so she could buy presents for the displaced family with 8 children.

Mary Stanton, author of "From Selma to Sorrow," says Viola Liuzzo "was one of these people who got really involved in everything she did, she discovered that a secretary where she worked had been laid off without severance pay. She gave the woman her entire paycheck hoping it would embarrass her employer into giving the woman severance. It didn't, and Liuzzo paid for her activism by losing her own job." Stanton says she was "intrigued by Liuzzo's refusal to play the part of the submissive housewife. While her neighbors were taking cooking classes or doing church volunteer work, Liuzzo was preparing for a career, crusading for workplace rights, and going back to college."

Viola attended the Carnegie Institute in Detroit, Michigan. She then enrolled part-time as a student in nursing at Wayne State University in 1962.  In 1964, she began attending the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Detroit, and joined the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), she was also a Teamster DRIVE(Democrat Republican Independent Voter Education) member. She passionately believed in the fight for civil rights and had a strong desire to make a difference, in her journal she wrote “I can’t sit back and watch my people suffer.” From the book "Life in the Teamsters The History of DRIVE" by David R. Piper "Taking a a stand on Civil Rights was something that Viola Liuzzo did regularly by attending meetings of the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE) and fighting for organized labor as a member of DRIVE."

The last time David Truskoff, one of the Selma marchers who would later write a book "The Second Civil War", saw Liuzzo was in a Selma church. She was standing before an applauding audience with a check in her hand. "She brought it up onto the stage and gave Hosea [Williams] a check from her husband's union," he says. "On her way back, there was a big cheer and applause. She was just beaming. She walked past me, nodding at me as if to say, 'We're going to win this thing.'"

Please watch this video

From David R. Piper's book "Liuzzo paid the ultimate price for her dedication to making the world a better place for working people no matter their color. Despite the danger involved, she went to Selma to assist in Dr. King’s campaign for equality. Anthony Liuzzo had feared for his wife’s safety, but having faced danger himself in the shape of company henchmen as a Teamster business agent, he supported her decision. Liuzzo learned about his wife’s death over the telephone late in the evening of March 25. Shortly afterwards he said, “She died doing what she believed in, and she believed in people whether they were white, black, Jew, or Gentile.”

Despite the efforts to discredit Liuzzo, her murder led President Lyndon B. Johnson to order an investigation into the Ku Klux Klan. It is also believed that her death helped encourage legislators to pass the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Viola's life is recounted in the books;
"The Martyrs:Sixteen Who Gave Their Lives for Racial Justice" by Jack Mendelsohn
"From Selma to Sorrow" by Mary Stanton
"Murder on the Highway: The Viola Liuzzo Story." by Beatrice Siegel
"Free At Last" by Sara Bullard

In 2004, Paola di Florio showed her documentary on Liuzzo, Home of the Brave, at the Sundance Film Festival. The critically acclaimed film explored Liuzzo’s story as well as the impact of her murder on her children.

She is among the 40 civil rights martyrs honored on the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, which was created in 1989. Two years later, the Women of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference placed a marker where she was killed on Highway 80. Liuzzo was also inducted into the Michigan Hall of Fame in 2006.

In May, 2013, Sally Liuzzo-Prado accepted the Ford Freedom Humanitarian Award in her mother's name, an honor given only to one other person — Nelson Mandela.

2015, Wayne State University student Viola Liuzzo was posthumously awarded an honorary doctor of laws degree, the first honorary degree awarded posthumously in the university's history. The honorary degree ceremony was followed by the dedication of a tree in the Law School courtyard as a permanent and living remembrance of Liuzzo's contributions and sacrifice.

2015, The Viola Liuzzo Park Association — a committee linking city and suburb, black and white, young and old, as Detroit celebrates what would have been her 90th birthday, a park renovation plan was unveiled, including a playscape, a walking trail, a picnic shelter and signs that tell the Liuzzo story. The committee, supported by the Greening of Detroit, has received financial commitments totaling $300,000 from the UAW-Ford, the Teamsters and others.

African proverb. "'As long as you say my name, I will live." Well, today we speak your name, Viola Liuzzo Teamster #SHERO!

RESOURCES:

https://teamster.org/content/civil-rights-martyr-viola-liuzzo-0

The International Teamster April 1965

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2017/12/15/a-white-mother-went-to-alabama-to-fight-for-civil-rights-the-klan-killed-her-for-it/?utm_term=.e5c4dd5417a7

https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2015/01/detroit-in-the-1940s/384523/

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2015/04/05/detroit-unites-honor-viola-liuzzo/25335391/

http://www.michiganwomenshalloffame.org/Images/Liuzzo,%20Viola.pdf

WSU’s Tribute to Viola Liuzzo http://video.tpt.org/video/2365457782/


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viola_Liuzzo