Dear friends,
Those of you who have been at St. Dunstan’s for a while may remember that 10 years ago I had the privilege of participating in the National Park Service’s commemoration of the 50th anniversary of Bloody Sunday in Selma, and the ensuing sucessful Voting Rights March from Selma to Montgomery.
For five days, March 21-25, we walked the 54 miles on the same road as those courageous foot soldiers, stopping each day at the places they had stopped, starting again the next morning. Along the way the park rangers gave us history lessons. And the long hours of walking forged friendships that are still strong a decade longer.
On March 25, 1965, the marchers arrived in Montgomery. A federal judge had limited the march to 300 people as long as they were in Lowndes County, but as they approached Montgomery the number swelled to 25,000.
Among that number was 39-year-old Viola Liuzzo, a white woman and mother of five in Detroit. She and her husband were watching television on the evening of March 7, when the show was interrupted by a breaking news bulletin showing officers of the law violently confronting peaceful Black marchers as they crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge.
Film of that violent Bloody Sunday shocked the nation, and when the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King issued a call to people of faith to come to Selma to aid in the protest, hundreds responded, Viola Liuzza among them. Liuzzo drove the family station wagon from Detroit to Selma, where she was put to work organizing and providing support for the ultimately successful five-day march.
On March 25, 1965, she was among the thousands who joined the original marchers for the last three miles to the State Capitol, where they heard King speaking from a flat bed truck. “How long” will injustice continue in this country? King asked. “Not long,” he replied, “because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
After the crowds dispersed, Liuzzo went back to work, ferrying people back and forth between Montgomery and Selma in her Oldsmobile. She planned to begin driving to Michigan as soon as her work was finished
As evening fell she was driving back to Montgomery on Highway 80 with a 19-year-old African American man, Leroy Moton, in the car with her. They had not been on that desolate road for long when they realized a car was pursuing them. She could not know it, but in that car were four Klansman, looking for action. A car with Michigan tags with a white woman and Black man in it was just the kind of thing they were hoping to find.
As they overtook her, three of the men fired guns, hitting Liuzzo twice in the head. She was killed instantly and her car veered into the ditch. The bullets missed Moton, but he knew that the men would be back to make sure they had been successful. Smearing himself with Viola’s blood, he pretended to be dead. The ruse worked. Liuzzo’s blood saved him.
Fifty years later, our own group of 300 was also joined by thousands of others as we reached Montgomery, and listened to Bernice King read her father’s famous speech from the State Capitol steps.
After the crowds were dispersed some of my new friends and I decided to stop and pay our respects at the memorial for Viola Liuzzo on Highway 80, near the spot where she was murdered.
As we stood and reflected on her life and death exactly 50 years earlier, I realized that March 25, the day of her death, has another meaning on the church calendar. It is the day of the Annunciation, the day that the angel Gabriel appears to Mary to tell her that she will bear a son who will be the savior of the world.
Mary responds to the angel’s startling announcement with song. Although she is a mere girl, perhaps as young as 13, she instantly understands what the birth of this child will mean, the kind of world her son will usher in.
“God has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly,” she sings. “He has filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty.”
In other words, her son has come to usher in the kingdom of God, a kingdom of peace and justice for all of God’s people; the same vision of that propelled those marchers 60 years ago. Jesus sacrificed his life for that vision of God’s kingdom. So did Viola Liuzzo. Both were martyrs for the kingdom of God.
As I stood at Liuzzo’s memorial I also remembered one more thing. The word martyr in Greek means “witness.” We are all called to be witnesses for God’s kingdom. That does not mean we are all called to be martyrs as we have come to understand that word, not that we are called to die for our beliefs.
But we are called to be to live in a way that brings us closer to that kingdom of God, where all God’s children are cherished and have what they need, to bear witnesses to God’s love and mercy, to protest against injustice and oppression in ways large and small.
There are big names we remember from the Civil Rights movement — King, Medgar Evers, John Lewis, Rosa Parks. But there are also thousands of others, like Viola Liuzzo and Leroy Morton behind those icons, ordinary citizens quietly doing extraordinary acts of great courage.
Those extraordinary acts by ordinary people can bring down empires. That is something we all need to remember these days.
With love,
Tricia