Civil Rights: Protest on Route 80

The great march was over, the last hallelujah had sounded from the speaker’s stand, the crowd of some 25,000 had left the streets outside the starkwhite capital in Montgomery, and a period of relative peace seemed about to descend on Alabama’s strife-torn civil rights scene. Then the white racists of Alabama, in characteristic fashion, shattered that peace by murdering a white woman from Detroit. This act of moronic savagery once again outraged the national conscience, provoked the President of the U.S. into a nationwide television outburst, in which he announced the arrest of four Ku Klux Klansmen and demanded that Congress curb the Klan.

Gibes & Guards. The four-day, 54-mile march from Selma to Montgomery had itself been an experience, not an excitement. It started on the after noon of Sunday, March 21, with some 3,400 marchers led by two Nobel Peace prizewinners—the Rev. Martin Luther King and Ralph Bunche, now U.N. Under Secretary for Special Political Affairs. In the procession, whites and Negroes, clergymen and beatniks, old and young, walked side by side. There was a blind man from Atlanta on the arm of his 64-year-old mother. There was a one-legged man from Michigan swinging along on crutches (from the sidelines, white hecklers kept calling out in parade cadence: “Left, left, left”). There was a nun from Kansas City who trudged grimly along while rednecks hooted gibes about her vows of chastity.

The marchers had plenty of protection—from some 1,000 military police sent by President Johnson, from 1,900 federalized Alabama National Guards men, from platoons of U.S. marshals and FBI men. Miles ahead of the marchers, demolition experts searched each bridge, each underpass. Rifle-bearing troops were stationed at every crossroad along the route. Long before the demonstrators arrived at their overnight bivouacs, a thin line of soldiers swept cautiously across each field to check for mines, bombs or booby traps.

There were, of course, some silly attempts at harassment. Bitter Alabamians drove past in cars, yelping obscenities at the marchers. One day a small plane flew over, dropped leaflets threatening to cut off the jobs of Negroes in the march (“An unemployed agitator ceases to agitate”). The 141-member Alabama legislature unanimously passed a resolution claiming that there had been “evidence of much fornication” at the marchers’ camps and that “young women are returning to their respective states apparently as unwed expectant mothers.” Retorted John Lewis, chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee: “All these segregationists can think of is fornication, and that is why there are so many different shades of Negroes.”

The Big Show. Martin Luther King himself left in mid-march to make a speech in Cleveland, returned to the procession a few miles outside Montgomery. He walked about 27 miles in all. That night, a batch of high-priced and highly diversified entertainers—such as Sammy Davis Jr., Nipsey Russell, Shelley Winters, Floyd Patterson, Harry Belafonte, Leonard Bernstein—performed for thousands packed in a muddy field in Montgomery.

The big show came on Thursday, outside the state capitol. There, blue-hel-meted state troopers and green-helmet-ed Alabama conservation and liquor-enforcement officers were strung out in glum lines, blocking entry to the building. Inside, Governor George Wallace peeked warily through Venetian blinds, occasionally stared through binoculars, and muttered, “That’s quite a crowd.”

The civil rights speeches droned on—and on and on. The crowd was quiet —and bored. Finally, after two hours, arose the man everyone had been waiting to hear. Martin Luther King was eloquent. “We have walked on meandering highways and rested our bodies on rocky byways,” he said. “They told us we wouldn’t get here. And there were those who said that we would get here only over their dead bodies, but all the world today knows that we are here and that we are standing before the forces of power in the state of Alabama, saying ‘We ain’t goin’ let nobody turn us around.’ ”

King called for more marches—on segregated schools, on poverty and “on ballot boxes until race baiters disappear from the political arena.” He lifted the crowd to a peak with a rhythmic, almost hypnotic chant: “I know you are asking today, ‘How long will it take?’ I come to say to you this afternoon however difficult the moment, however frustrating the hour, it will not be long because truth pressed to earth will rise again. How long? Not long, because no lie can live forever. How long? Not long, because you still reap what you sow. How long? Not long, because the arm of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” In a concluding crescendo he boomed out the words of the Battle Hymn of the Republic, shouting “Glory hallelujah! Glory hallelujah! Glory hallelujah! Glory hallelujah!”

The ostensible purpose of the whole march had been to present to Governor Wallace a petition protesting voting discrimination. The Governor had promised to see “any citizens of Alabama”—and a committee of 20 petitioners, all Alabamians, had been appointed. But now George Wallace reneged. An aide met the petitioners, blandly told them, “The capitol is closed today.” Then Wallace went on television and, with his unerring instinct for impropriety, denounced the civil rights march as “prostitution of lawful process.” Said he: “I see that Ralph Bunche, the United Nations man, was here. He’s supposed to be defending us against Communists, but today he was consorting with known Communists.”

“She Hung Up.” As night fell, a steady stream of cars were moving along Route 80, carrying demonstrators from Montgomery back to Selma. One of the volunteer drivers was red-haired Viola Gregg Liuzzo, 39, twice-divorced, wife of a Detroit Teamster union official, the mother of five children, aged six to 18, one a 17-year-old married daughter living in Georgia. She was occasionally involved in protest activities, once kept two of her sons out of school more than a month to dramatize her objection to a state law permitting students to drop out of school at 16, which she thought too young.

Mrs. Liuzzo participated March 16 with other Wayne students in a Selma sympathy march to the federal building in Detroit. The same day she phoned her husband Anthony, 51, told him she was going to Selma. “I asked her to come home and talk it over,” said Liuzzo, “but she said it was everybody’s fight, she had to go. She said there were three or four Wayne kids—I don’t have any names—going with her. Then she hung up.”

Viola Liuzzo walked along Route 80 the first day of the march, spent the next three days driving demonstrators back and forth along the route. On Thursday she walked into Montgomery with the crowd. When the rally at the capitol was over, she drove a carload of demonstrators back to Selma. It was dark when she started back to Montgomery to pick up more people. With her in the 1963 Oldsmobile was a Negro barber from Selma, Le Roy Moton, 19, a member of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

About 20 miles out of Selma, a car began following the Oldsmobile. It hung behind for five miles. Then, in an isolated two-lane stretch of Highway 80 near a marsh called Big Swamp, it pulled alongside. Someone turned a flashlight on Mrs. Liuzzo. Moton heard no shots, but a bullet hit the car roof and another smashed through the window in a shower of glass bits, striking Mrs. Liuzzo in the temple. Her blood spattered on the dashboard, and the car swerved out of control. Young Moton grabbed for the steering wheel, but the car hurtled off the shoulder, knocked over three fence posts in a barbed-wire fence, finally stopped in a pasture.

“Of Course, I Regret.” The gunman’s car turned around and stopped. Moton huddled on the floor, pretending to be dead. Someone flashed a light into the front seat. Then the other car raced away. Moton returned to the highway, hitchhiked to Selma and blurted his story to a city cop. By the time police reached the car, Mrs. Liuzzo was dead.

Next morning George Wallace was back on network television again, adding more venom to the violence. During an interview on NBC’s Today show, he was asked about Mrs. Liuzzo’s death. “Of course, I regret this incident,” said Wallace. “I would like to point out, though, that people are assaulted in every state in the Union. It’s still safer on Highway 80 than it is riding a subway in New York.” Unwilling to leave it at that, he added, “You can’t blame any one individual about things that happen in Alabama any more than you can blame Governor Rockefeller about Malcolm X being slain in New York. And I regret this incident, but I can say with 25,000 marching in the streets and chanting and maligning and slandering and libeling the people of this state as they did for several hours on your network and the other networks, I think the people of our state were greatly restrained.”

“Justice Must Be Done.” Only 16 hours after Mrs. Liuzzo was murdered, President Johnson, flanked by FBI Chief J. Edgar Hoover and Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach, went on television himself to announce that the FBI had already arrested four members of the Ku Klux Klan in connection with the slaying. They were: Eugene Thomas, 43, a Bessemer, Ala., steelworker; William Orville Eaton, 41, a “retired” Bessemer steelworker; Collie Leroy Wilkins Jr., 21, a Fairfield mechanic; and Gary Thomas Rowe Jr., 34, an ex-bartender from Birmingham.

Johnson’s anger was obvious. “Mrs. Liuzzo went to Alabama to serve the struggle for justice,” said the President. “She was murdered by the enemies of justice who for decades have used the rope and the gun and the tar and the feathers to terrorize their neighbors. They struck by night, as they generally do, for their purpose cannot stand the light of day.” Grimly he labeled the Klan “a hooded society of bigots.”

“If Klansmen hear my voice today, let it be both an appeal—and a warning —to get out of the Ku Klux Klan now and return to a decent society—before it is too late,” said Johnson. “Justice must be done, in the largest city as we’l as the smallest village, on the dirt road or on the interstate highway. We will not be intimidated by the terrorists of the Ku Klux Klan any more than we will be intimidated by the terrorists in North Viet Nam.”