In today’s moment in Women’s History, we will highlight Viola Fauver Gregg Liuzzo, born April 11, 1925, in the small town of California, Pennsylvania, and killed on March 25, 1965, in Selma, Alabama.
A Detroit housewife and mother of five, Viola had seen the sting of poverty and Jim Crow as a girl. She never finished high school, yet she later studied at Wayne State University and joined the NAACP. When Bloody Sunday unfolded on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, something inside her stirred. She drove south, leaving her family behind, to ferry exhausted marchers back and forth during the historic Selma-to-Montgomery voting rights march.
On the final evening, while driving a young Black activist named Leroy Moton toward Selma, a car full of Ku Klux Klan members chased them down Highway 80. Gunfire shattered the night. Viola was killed instantly at age thirty-nine.
Her death shocked the nation and helped push the Voting Rights Act across the finish line. One quiet fun fact: though she once protested Detroit’s dropout laws and landed in jail herself, she never stopped believing education could open every locked door.
Remember…Education is FREEdom of mind and never should be colorblind.
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