January 15, 2026 • 58 mins
In 1965, a car full of klansmen shot and killed Viola Liuzzo, a white woman from Detroit who volunteered to drive civil rights activists back to Selma after the march to Montgomery. The FBI immediately kicked into overdrive to drag her name through the mud.
Sources:
Stanton, Mary. From Selma to Sorrow: The Life and Death of Viola Liuzzo. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998
Mendelsohn, Jack. The martyrs : sixteen who gave their lives for racial justice. Harper & Row 1966
https://www.justice.gov/crt/case-document/micheal-schwerner-james-chaney-andrew-goodman
https://famous-trials.com/mississippi-burningtrial/1978-barnetteconfession
https://mississippiencyclopedia.org/entries/schwerner-michael/
http://repository.wustl.edu/concern/videos/7p88cm77s
https://voicesofdemocracy.umd.edu/dr-martin-luther-king-jr-long-not-long-speech-text/
https://archive.org/details/martyrssixteenwh00mend/page/176/mode/2up
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Wo Zone media.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
Before her children even knew their mother had been killed,
the federal government was already busy rewriting the story of
her death. She had lived a good life.
Speaker 1 (00:18):
Though not a long one.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
She was happily remarried after a divorce, and despite the
demands of motherhood, she went back to school in her thirties.
People who loved her described her as a Christian woman,
a devoted mother, and someone who believed passionately in loving everyone,
so much so that she put that belief into action.
(00:42):
And as the FBI commandeered the investigation into her death,
her grieving spouse was left trying to explain what had
happened to her children. Her youngest was just six years old.
She had both hands on the steering wheel when she was.
Speaker 1 (00:59):
Shot in the head.
Speaker 2 (01:01):
She was dead before her car came to a stop,
crashing not far from the spot where her killer had
fired at her. The person she was traveling with that
day was miraculously not hit. There should have been no
way to spin it. The investigation revealed the shooter and
his motive almost immediately, but federal officials seated doubt, planning
(01:24):
stories in the media that she was sexually immoral that
she neglected her children, that her spouse was a person
with questionable associates, she was an extremist, an outside agitator,
she had dangerous left wing politics, and she might even
be a communist. She was sick, degenerate, and she brought
(01:45):
this on herself. Of course, the FBI director spreading these
lies about her knew they weren't true. But in March
of nineteen sixty five, Jay Edgar Hoover was desperate to
distract from the fact that one of the clans man
who killed Viola the USO, was on his pay room.
(02:06):
I'm Molly Conger, and this is We're gude of guys.
(02:28):
This is not the story I promised you last week.
Speaker 1 (02:31):
I'm so sorry. I'm sure you already guessed that. I know.
Speaker 2 (02:37):
I ended last week's episode with a teaser for something
fairly specific, and I will write that episode.
Speaker 1 (02:44):
I will.
Speaker 2 (02:46):
It's poor form to complain about a job I do
in my pajamas, but it's not easy writing what is
essentially a twenty five page research paper on a new
topic every week. The only way it works is to
write about something.
Speaker 1 (02:59):
I'm genuinely.
Speaker 2 (03:01):
And I'm so lucky that I get to do that,
but my heart's got to be in it, and this
week my heart was troubled. I usually finished writing pretty
late on a Monday night Tuesday morning, if we're being
specific about it. My editor Rory really only gets about
(03:23):
a day and a half with the file to clean
it up, put the music in it, and bed the
audio clips and work whatever magic that he does that.
Speaker 1 (03:30):
Makes it sound good.
Speaker 2 (03:32):
And the edit I listened to on Wednesday afternoon is
the one you hear Thursday morning. It's a tight timeline,
so I really have to lock in on what I'm
going to research and write about pretty early in the week.
And obviously I knew what I was going to be
working on for this week's episode because it was a
continuation of the story from last week's.
Speaker 3 (03:52):
Episode until it wasn't On Tuesdays, I've usually been up
most of the night, so I don't get a lot done.
Speaker 2 (04:03):
I try to run all my errands for the week
on Wednesdays, but by Thursday I'm already starting to feel
like I'm running out of time and it's way too
late to change my plans. I've got to lock myself
in my office and focus on the topic I've chosen.
I was supposed to be writing about that Nazi serial killer.
I promised you, But this past week we all watched
(04:26):
a woman die on Wednesday, and I still ran my errands.
It's the only day I have time for it. But
I went about my business in kind of a daze,
and I wept for her, for her wife, for her children,
for all of us, for the world we have to
live in. But we all still had to get up
(04:47):
and go to work the next day. So on Thursday
and I sat at my computer and I kept taking
notes for the episode I was trying to write. On Friday,
more video of that murder came out.
Speaker 1 (05:01):
I watched it.
Speaker 2 (05:03):
Maybe you did too. If you didn't, you don't have to.
There's no moral requirement for you to bear witness in
that way.
Speaker 1 (05:12):
I promise you.
Speaker 2 (05:14):
But I did because I always do. And it hit
me pretty hard for the obvious reasons. Right, I was
watching a murder. I find myself doing that not infrequently
in this line of work, and it never gets easier,
and if it does, I'll quit. But something in particular
(05:39):
was stuck rattling around in my head. In the moments
before a federal agent shot and killed Renee Good, she
smiled at him, and she said, that's fine, dude, I'm.
Speaker 1 (05:53):
Not mad at you.
Speaker 2 (05:56):
That's a striking moment, even just on its own. She
really wasn't angry. You can see her face. She's brave,
she's determined, but she's telling the truth.
Speaker 1 (06:12):
She isn't mad.
Speaker 2 (06:15):
Her presence there wasn't out of anger but love. She
isn't mad at this particular man. She's doing her part
against an injustice that's bigger than either of them. This
isn't a show about current events. This isn't a show
about the news. This isn't an episode about Renee Good.
(06:39):
That's not what I write about, and that's not what
you're here to listen to. But it isn't my fault
that history rhymes. I wish it didn't. I wish the
decade I've spent writing about white supremacist violence wasn't increasingly
relevant in the way I think about current events.
Speaker 1 (06:58):
But it is.
Speaker 2 (07:01):
And when I watched that video, I didn't just see
Renee Good. I saw Viola Luzo. And when I heard
Renee Good speak her last words, I didn't just hear her.
I heard Michael Schwerner. Michael Schwerner, James Cheney, and Andrew
Goodman were field workers with the Congress of Racial Equality,
(07:24):
and on June twenty first, nineteen sixty four, they were
murdered by a mob of klansmen that included members of
the local sheriff's department. When Alton Wayne Roberts pulled Michael
Schwerner from his car, he asked him, are you that
N word lover? The two men were face to face,
(07:45):
just inches apart. The klansmen had both of his hands
on Schwerner's shoulders, having spun him around to look him
in the eye, and Schwerner, a twenty four year old
Jewish social worker from New York City, looked back at
that clan and he said, Sir, I know just how
you feel. He was calm, he wasn't angry. He was
(08:10):
trying to start a conversation.
Speaker 1 (08:12):
I think.
Speaker 2 (08:14):
I guess we can't really know what kind of dialogue
he was trying to have, because that's as far as
he got. The klansman still had one hand on one
of Schwerner's shoulders when he used his other hand to
draw his gun, and he shot Michael Schwerner point blank
in the chest, killing him instantly. And I thought, too
of Margaret Ann Nott, who was just sixteen years old
(08:36):
when she was killed in Butler, Alabama, in nineteen seventy one.
She was sitting on the ground with her eyes closed
in silent prayer when she was hit by the car
that rammed into the permitted protest she was participating in
that morning. As Margaret lay on the ground dying, she
repeated over and over again, I died for freedom.
Speaker 1 (09:00):
I died for freedom.
Speaker 2 (09:03):
And I thought too of Talisian non Kai Mech, who,
along with Ricky John Best, was one of two men
who died trying to protect two teenage girls on a
train in Portland in twenty seventeen. A Somali immigrant, a
young black Muslim girl wearing her hyjab, was being threatened,
and those strangers gave their lives to stop a neo
Nazi from hurting her. And after Tualisian was stabbed, as
(09:29):
he lay there bleeding out in the lap of a
stranger on the floor of the train, his last words were,
tell everyone on this train, I love them. I'm not
mad at you. I know just how you feel. I
(09:49):
died for freedom. Tell everyone on this train, I love them.
Speaker 1 (09:56):
I'm not mad at you. I'm not mad at you.
I know just how you feel. I'm not mad at you.
Speaker 2 (10:07):
Their words, all of them, the last words of people
killed by Nazis and klansmen and agents of the state
who served the same ends as those Nazis and those clansmen,
were drowning out my own thoughts. And I was reading
and writing and trying to do my silly little job,
trying to think my own thoughts. But I couldn't hear
(10:29):
my own thoughts over the sound of the blood pounding
in my head. And it sounded like Renee Good. It
sounded like Michael Schwerner.
Speaker 3 (10:39):
It sounded like.
Speaker 2 (10:40):
Delesian and Margaret and Ricky and Viola and Heather Higher
and so many people who woke up on a day
they didn't know as their last, and they did something brave,
not because they were angry or violent, but because they
loved the very idea of love so much.
Speaker 1 (11:04):
And I didn't write a word that day.
Speaker 2 (11:09):
On Saturday night, I was sitting in my office with
a book in my lap and thirty eight browser tabs
open on my computer, still trying to figure out how
I'm going to write six thousand words about anything this week.
And I saw a video of a vigil for Renee
Good held on a rainy Friday evening in New Hampshire.
(11:29):
Rob Hirschfeld, the Bishop of the Episcopal Church of New Hampshire,
must have spent the day hearing the same inescapable litany
of names that was pounding in my own head, because
he reminded the crowd in New Hampshire of Jonathan Daniels,
a New Hampshire native who died in a corner store
in a tiny town outside Montgomery, Alabama, in August of
(11:50):
nineteen sixty five. Daniels was a seminarian, still a year
away from finishing his studies before he could pursue ordination,
and he'd spent the spring semester of nineteen sixty five
working in Selma, Alabama. He returned to Alabama during his
summer break that year to register voters, tutor children, and
(12:12):
help black families get to church. He went back to
Alabama that summer to do what he felt God had
called him to. When the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee staged
a protest outside of a whites only department store in
Fort Deposit, Alabama. He was one of thirty protesters who
were arrested. After six days in jail. The whole group
(12:35):
was released, but they were left stranded in the middle
of nowhere. While they were waiting there for the ride
back to town, the group decided to send a small delegation
to a nearby corner store to buy some cold sodas
they'd all spent six days sweating in an Alabama jail
and this was one of the only stores in the
(12:56):
area that would serve black customers. Jonathan Daniels and father
Richard Morris Row walked to the store with Joyce Bailey
and Ruby Sales, two black teenage girls, both activists with
the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Ruby Sales, just seventeen years
old that summer, reached the door first. She recalled that
(13:20):
afternoon in an interview for a PBS documentary two decades later.
Speaker 4 (13:26):
And so when we got to the store, as we
approached a store and began to go up the steps,
suddenly standing there was Tom Coleman that at that time
I didn't know his name. I found that out later,
(13:47):
and I recognized that he had a shotgun, and I
recognized that he was yelling something about black bitches. But
in some real ways, with that confrontation, my mind kind
of blinked, and I wasn't processing all that was happening.
And so as I was trying to process the meaning
(14:08):
of this, suddenly I fell a tug because I was
in front and Jonathan was behind me, and I fell
a tug and someone and the next thing I knew,
there was this blast and I had fallen down, and
I remember thinking, God, this is what it feels like
(14:28):
to be dead. I thought I was dead, And just
as I was trying to sort of deal with being dead,
I heard another shot go off.
Speaker 1 (14:44):
But she wasn't dead.
Speaker 2 (14:47):
The shot Ruby heard as she was lying on the
ground contemplating her own apparent death was meant for Joyce,
but Father Morris Row had wrapped himself around her as
he turned to run.
Speaker 1 (15:01):
Only Joyce got away.
Speaker 2 (15:04):
The priest was shot in the back, leaving him unable
to walk for several years. The first blast from the
deputy's shotgun, the one aimed straight at Ruby, hadn't touched her.
The tug, she felt. The force that knocked her to
the ground, where she now lay covered in blood, had
(15:24):
been Jonathan Daniels pushing her out of the way, and
the blood pooling around her was his. He'd taken the
full force of the shotgun blast point blank, killing him instantly.
In the video of that rainy vigil in New Hampshire,
Bishop Hirschfeld shared the story of Jonathan Daniel's death to
(15:47):
make it inescapably clear how serious he was as a
man of the cloth. Thoughts and prayers are sort of
his stock in trade. At a vigil like that one,
that's all anyone really expects of him. His thoughts and
his prayers, that's all anyone really has to offer after
(16:07):
a tragedy. But the Bishop opened his remarks by wondering
whether the time for eloquent words had passed. Thoughts and
prayers are beautiful, but they aren't moving the needle. Jonathan
Daniels didn't fight for civil rights with a strongly worded
letter or a signature on a petition, or a beautiful
(16:30):
sermon from the pulpit. He pressed his body into the
barrel of a shotgun.
Speaker 5 (16:39):
I have told the clergy of the Episcopal Dioceis of
New Hampshire that we may be entering into that same witness,
and I've asked them to get their affairs in order.
Speaker 6 (16:56):
To make sure they have their wills written, because it
may be that now is no longer the time for statements,
but for us, with our bodies, to stand between the
powers of this world and the most vulnerable.
Speaker 2 (17:23):
I watched that video on Saturday night, and I thought
about what it means to live in a world where
his words are frightening and comforting to me an equal measure.
I hope the clergy of the Episcopal Diocese of New
Hampshire don't die the way Jonathan Daniels died. But more
than that, I wish we did not live in a
world where a shotgun is pointed.
Speaker 1 (17:43):
At a child. But we do, and they might.
Speaker 2 (17:46):
And while we try to untangle the factors that led
to the loaded gun aimed the most vulnerable among us,
maybe the best we can hope for is the courage
to absorb some of that pain. I woke up Sday
morning and the first thing I saw on my phone
was the news that a synagogue in Mississippi had burned.
Terrible news, the kind of news I will definitely follow
(18:10):
up on eventually. Whoever would do something like that as
almost certainly the kind of guy I write about or
will one day.
Speaker 1 (18:19):
I wasn't quite.
Speaker 2 (18:20):
Awake yet, but I recognized the name of the synagogue. Impossible. Really,
I'm not Jewish, and I've never been to Mississippi, but
beth Is Reel Congregation and Jackson, Mississippi, sounded so familiar
because it was bombed by the Klan in nineteen sixty seven.
Everything old is new again. There's nothing new.
Speaker 1 (18:40):
Under the sun.
Speaker 2 (18:41):
And I was running out of time to write something
for this week's episode, and it felt like history was
demanding to be acknowledged. I stared at my computer for
a while, and on Sunday afternoon, I went to a
vigil for Renee Good. It was held in a little
park downtown. Hundreds of people filled the park, spilling out
(19:04):
onto the sidewalks. I saw friends and neighbors and strangers,
babies and strollers and old women pushing walkers. I saw
the pastor of a church in my neighborhood wearing a
rainbow scarf and a warm smile. I saw the man
running to be my congressman, standing quietly in the crowd,
(19:26):
not campaigning, just present. People had homemade signs. Some of
them were impressive works of art, and others were hastily
repurposed from the last protest. I saw a child wearing
a cardboard box painted white. It was a little ice
cube costume with third graders against ice scrawled on the
(19:49):
back in pink marker. And I saw an older woman
carrying a single sheet of plain printer paper with a
phrase written on it in a black marker. It said,
you can't kill us all. That's what one of Renee's
neighbors shouted at the ice agents, trying to chase off
(20:11):
the crowd that gathered at the scene after she was
shot and killed. Instead of running away from the sound
of gunfire, a crowd formed, bearing witness and demanding justice.
Before her body was even cold. They had just witnessed
an execution, and their answer was you can't kill us All.
(20:36):
Those words spoken by an ordinary person in an extraordinary circumstance,
traveled halfway across the country to be there on that sign,
a sign carried by another entirely ordinary person, an ordinary
person who recognizes that she too, now finds herself in
an extraordinary circumstance. Normally I make careful notes of what
(21:02):
was said and who spoke. But I just paced, walking
laps around that two hundred square foot patch of grass,
feeling like the weight of history would crush us all.
Walking home afterwards, I knew I wouldn't write another word
that day. I don't have to walk down Fourth Street
(21:23):
to get home, but I always do. It's been almost
nine years since a woman I never met was killed there.
There's a purple bow tied around the post holding up
a no parking sign. Closest to the spot where she died.
The brick wall of the neighboring office building is covered
in chalk messages. I guess it's mostly sheltered from the
(21:46):
rain somehow, because it isn't derotating changing set of messages.
It's a monument. Maybe it's never rained at an angle
in that narrow street. I don't understand it. There are
thousands of little men messages scrawled on the walls on
either side of Fourth Street, but the biggest one reads.
Speaker 1 (22:06):
Gone but not forgotten. And I know that.
Speaker 2 (22:10):
One's been untouched for at least eight years.
Speaker 1 (22:13):
Maybe it's older than that.
Speaker 2 (22:14):
But the first time I remember seeing it was when
I stopped by on her birthday, May twenty ninth, twenty eighteen.
Heather Hier would have been thirty three that day if
she hadn't been dead for a year. So after the
(22:43):
vigil for Renee Good, I stopped on the street where
Heather Higher was killed, and I stood in the street
where she died with tears in my eyes.
Speaker 1 (22:51):
Until a car came.
Speaker 2 (22:54):
And then I remembered that we all still have to
live in the world and go about our business. So
what I mean to say is, as I'm writing this,
it's Monday. I do most of my writing on Mondays.
It's a bad habit, but usually when I'm writing on Monday,
I've spent all week researching and taking notes, and I
(23:16):
kind of have an idea what the words will be.
But I woke up this morning and I started over.
Because every time I sat down to research and take
notes and plot out the story I was supposed to
write this week, I cried. I cried for Renee and
for Heather, and for Michael Schwerner and James Cheney and
(23:38):
Andrew Goodman and Mayola Luso and Talisian and Ricky and
Margaret and Jonathan, and for all the martyrs of the
struggle for freedom whose stories we don't know, not yet.
I couldn't write a regular episode of my show because
my heart demanded something else. I know this isn't a
serious job. I make an entertainment product. I'm a journalist
(24:02):
and a researcher, and I take my work very seriously.
But I'm not delusional. This is a podcast. It's in
your ear on your way to work, while you wash dishes,
walk your dog. But if I didn't believe just a
little bit this was important, I would have given up
(24:23):
by now. I wouldn't work this hard to write these
stories if I didn't think there was some value in
understanding the history of writing political violence, in fitting those
pieces together to show the connections between these allegedly isolated,
random acts of violence. As bewildering and terrifying and overwhelming
as things seem right now, I want to help you
(24:46):
see that these are not unprecedented times.
Speaker 1 (24:50):
They are, in fact, very.
Speaker 2 (24:52):
Precedented, and the precedents are pretty dark, but there are
things we can learn from the past, and there's comfort
in knowing we aren't the first ones to walk into
this darkness. So I didn't write the story I promised
you last week. And I can't tell you anything you
(25:12):
don't already know about what's in the news today. But
I can tell you a little bit about a story
that rhymes. I can tell you about the day Viola
le Uso died. On March twenty fifth, nineteen sixty five,
marchers poured into Montgomery, Alabama. The front of the march
(25:35):
reached the capitol steps around noon, but the crowd of
more than twenty five thousand stretched out over two miles long,
and the end of the march didn't arrive until more
than an hour later. A program from the event lists
more than a dozen speakers. There were speakers from the
Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Congress for Racial Equality, the NAACP.
(25:58):
John Lewis spoke on behalf of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.
Nobel Peace Prize winner and New and Under Secretary General
Ralph Bunch gave a speech. A Philip Randolph spoke the
march from Selma to Montgomery had been hard fought. It
took nineteen days to cross those fifty four miles. On
(26:20):
the first attempt, the march didn't even make it out
of Selma. It ended the very day it began, a
day that quickly became known as Bloody Sunday. Dozens of
marchers were injured and seventeen were hospitalized after brutal beatings
from the police waiting for them on the other side
of the Edmund Pettis Bridge. The second attempt was quickly
(26:41):
foiled by a court injunction. Hours after the march was
called off, a white mob attacked three Unitarian ministers who
were in town for the march. James Reeb died from
his injuries. By the time the march to Montgomery started
for the third time, the stakes were clear. A minister
(27:02):
had been beaten to death. The chairman of the Student
on Violent Coordinating Committee had been struck over the head
with a billy club, fracturing a skull. They'd been beaten
and tearcass and run down with horses and dogs. They
knew they would face violence, they understood they may face death.
(27:24):
And when they finally reached Montgomery, the main event that
afternoon was a speech from doctor Martin.
Speaker 1 (27:29):
Luther King Junior. You may not know this one, at
least not as well as you know.
Speaker 2 (27:35):
Famous speech is like I have a dream from the
march on Washington, or I've been to the mountaintop from
the Memphis sanitation worker strike. But I think you know
one of the final lines of this speech.
Speaker 7 (27:51):
I contemplated this afternoon. I have a difficult moment. I
have a substrate in Vialla it will not be, because
truth pressures will rise again. A long not long it
cause no lie can near frail. A long not law alone.
(28:14):
It calls you shall read what your soul A long
way on the scaffold, long way up on the thing
that's just that scaffold, sway the future behind the dim
unknown standard, God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own.
Speaker 4 (28:33):
A long not law of the moral.
Speaker 7 (28:38):
Universe is long, but it ben towards the outside.
Speaker 2 (28:46):
The art of the moral universe is long, but it
bends towards justice. That's one of doctor King's more famous lines.
And I think there's a reason I've only ever heard
it out of context. Why I never really thought about
it having been spoken on the afternoon of March twenty fifth,
nineteen sixty five, from the steps of the Capitol Building
(29:08):
in Montgomery, Alabama, flanked on either side by civil rights
activists with fresh bruises on their faces. When you neatly
cut around those words and you lift them out of
that speech, carving away the context of the bloody fifty
four miles between Selma and Montgomery, you might think moral
arcs just spend that way, that the natural shape of
(29:31):
such an ark just tends to angle in the direction
of justice, that if you wait patiently, that gentle curve
will end, and there at its tip will be justice.
But the moral arc of the universe doesn't bent.
Speaker 1 (29:48):
It is bent.
Speaker 2 (29:50):
It is pushed and pled and molded and hammered and kneaded,
and it disgreased with our blood.
Speaker 1 (29:58):
It doesn't bent.
Speaker 2 (30:00):
We have to bend it. It is not enough to
observe its shape. You have to throw your body against it.
You have to look back at that long arc and
remember who toiled and struggled and cried and bled before you.
That arc bends because you were not the first person
who wished that it did, because we are not the
(30:22):
first generation to put our shoulder to it and push.
Speaker 1 (30:27):
Viola Luzo knew that.
Speaker 2 (30:30):
She was there that afternoon in Montgomery. She heard doctor
King give that speech just a few hours before she died. Now,
normally I would have at least skimmed most of the
biographies that have been written about her. There are a
couple books about her life, and I would try to
(30:51):
sort of suss out the angle that each of the
authors was approaching the story with and cross reference the
details that didn't quite match with newspaper articles and interviews
with people who were there. That's my normal approach. Normally
I work on an episode all week. As I said,
I started this morning, so he didn't quite have time
(31:14):
for the normal process. So forgive me if her life
story is a little lighter on the details. What I
did read, though, was the chapter on Viola written in
a book by Reverend Jack Mendelssohn. He published a book
of stories about civil rights martyrs in nineteen sixty six,
so the interviews he had with people who knew Viola
were fresh. He was writing this just a few months
(31:37):
after she died, And of course I also read Jay
Edgar Hoover's frantic and furious memos as he cooked up
his smear campaign against this dead mother. Yola was born
in Pennsylvania nineteen twenty five, the daughter of a school
teacher and a coal miner. Her father lost a hand
in a mining accident during the Great Depression, so the
(31:59):
family relied on income from short term teaching positions. Her
mother took anywhere she could find them. They moved often,
but Viola spent much of her childhood in the South.
At eighteen, she married a much older man, her boss
at the restaurant where she worked. When they divorced six
years later, she kept custody of their two daughters. In
(32:21):
nineteen fifty one, she married Anthony Luzo, a business agent
for Teamsters Local two forty seven, and the couple had
three more children together. After she died, those who wanted
to minimize her death would say that she was mentally ill,
she had a criminal record, she was a bad mother,
(32:43):
she was crazy, and her interest in civil rights was
a recent flight of fancy, perhaps a symptom of her
erratic mind. Now, I would argue that even someone with
a criminal record and a mental illness can have a
firmly held belief in the value of civil rights and
make their own decision to participate in a political protest,
(33:03):
and either way it certainly isn't a reason to kill them.
But in Viola's case, I think the people repeating those
things are being unfair on purpose. I think they know
they're lying. Now, it is kind of true that she
had a criminal record. She'd been cited for failing to
(33:26):
send three of her children to school. In nineteen sixty four,
she kept them home for forty days to protest a
school policy that allowed teenagers to drop out of school.
Without parental permission. I don't fully understand the logic of
the protest, but the cause makes perfect sense. She told
(33:46):
the Detroit Board of Education that she regretted leaving school
at fourteen, and she wished the law had kept her
in school. She believed that requiring children to stay in
school until eighteen would protect them from being exploded. She
was charged with violating the state school compulsory age law,
the one she was protesting. Years later, her daughter Penny
(34:10):
explained to author Mary Stanton that it wasn't some hysterical,
unreasonable thing. It was a carefully considered, active protest. She
was trying to get publicity and draw attention to what
she thought was a dangerous law that would hurt children.
A few weeks after her arrest in June of nineteen
(34:31):
sixty four, maybe in an effort to just blow off
some steam, she took off on an impromptu road trip
without telling her husband. This, coupled with the arrest, provided
the pieces for the narrative that she was irrational and
mentally disturbed. Newspapers seized on this line from an FBI
(34:52):
memo about how she disappeared to Canada and her husband
had to report her missing, but they lived in Michigan.
Canada is just kind of the next town over. It
does appear that her interest in civil rights came on suddenly.
She never brought it up before nineteen sixty four. But
(35:13):
nineteen sixty four was as good a time as any
for a housewife in Detroit to become interested in the
civil rights movement. She didn't just wake up one day
and drive to Selma. She had been involved in the
Detroit chapter of the NAACP for a year leading up
to her death. Honestly, I think it might be more
unusual for a white housewife in Michigan to be outspoken
(35:34):
about segregation earlier than this.
Speaker 1 (35:38):
It makes perfect sense that she.
Speaker 2 (35:39):
Would develop an interest in the civil rights movement at
the height of the civil rights movement. I don't understand
why this is meant to be suspicious. It was bloody
Sunday that finally spurred her to greater action. She was
active locally, but the footage of the violence on the
Edmund Pettis Bridge and March of nineteen sixty five was
(36:02):
too much. Her husband recalls the tears streaming down her
face when she saw it on the evening news. When
James Ree was murdered a few days later. She attended
a memorial service for him at her local Unitarian church.
Later that week, she marched with a few hundred students
from Wayne State University to show their solidarity with the
(36:23):
marchers in Selma. At that rally, she heard several students
who'd been down in Selma speak about their experiences. They
described the way the deputies laughed and sneered at them
on bloody Sunday, saying those cops were just like the
men who murdered James Reeb, except they'd been deputized by
(36:43):
the state to do it. After that march, she called
her husband. She'd made up her mind and she was
going to Selma. That's not unreasonable. That's not something you
(37:12):
would only do if you were on drugs or in
the grips of a serious psychiatric episode. It doesn't even
seem that surprising to me. She wasn't the only person
who did this. She'd been interested in the civil rights
movement for a year. She was involved with the NAACP
and the Unitarian Church. She marched in Detroit in solidarity
(37:33):
with Selma, and she heard the impassioned pleas for help
from the people who'd been there. They wanted more people
to go back down to Alabama with them to join
the march to Montgomery. So she did, that's not crazy.
(37:53):
I can see myself doing something like that. I think
a lot of us can. It's not your fight, her
husband told her, but she disagreed. She told her family
it's everyone's fight. Viola spent six days in Alabama, the
(38:16):
last six days of her life. She got in touch
with organizers at the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and they
put her to work shuttling people back and forth between
Selma and Montgomery. When the march began, Viola march too.
She walked across the Edmund Pettis Bridge, just two weeks
after sobbing on the couch at home in Detroit watching
(38:37):
the news of bloody Sunday. The night before the march
reached Montgomery, Biola was volunteering with the medics at Saint
Jude's Catholic Church just outside the city. She spent the
evening gently dressing the bloody feet of marchers who'd walked
barefoot on this pilgrimage. Father Timothy D. C offered her
(38:58):
one of the cots in the church basement. She said
there were people who needed it more than she did,
and she slept alone in her car. On the morning
of March twenty fifth, she asked Father d C if
there was anywhere she could go to get a good.
Speaker 1 (39:13):
Look at where they were headed.
Speaker 2 (39:15):
So he took her up to the church bell tower,
and together they looked out over the landscape, and they
could see the line of marchers already streaming from Saint
Jude's heading out for the four mile walk to the capitol.
Howl Dec says she got pale and anxious, and she
turned to him and she said that suddenly she felt
very sure that someone would die that day. But they
(39:40):
prayed together and that seemed to ease her fears. And
as she walked away from Saint Jude's that morning, she
slipped off her shoes so she could make the final
leg of the march into Montgomery barefoot. That evening, she
was back at Saint Jude's. Leroy Moten, a local actor
of us she'd been working with all week, took her
(40:02):
car from the church and drove back into Montgomery to
pick up a group of marchers who needed a ride
back to Selma. Biola called her husband and her children
every night during that trip, and this night was no different.
One of her daughters later recalled hearing the sounds of
celebration in the background when her mom called that last time,
(40:23):
everybody was celebrating the march.
Speaker 1 (40:26):
Had been successful.
Speaker 2 (40:29):
She must have been calling from Saint Jude's. After the
march was over, but before she got into her car
for the last time, Biola told her husband she'd be
leaving very soon, and she asked him to wire her
fifty dollars for the trip home. On the way to Selma,
in the car with Leroy Mowten, another car tailgated them aggressively.
(40:52):
She'd been warned this was a possibility. There were white
men driving around just looking for any car that had
both black and white people in side, particularly cars with
a white woman and a black man. Viola seemed unbothered
by the tailgating, though, and she joked with Leroy about
how she'd like to come back to visit Alabama again
(41:13):
one day if she didn't get killed. In the meantime,
after they dropped off the first batch of passengers in Selma,
Leroy and Viola took a break for dinner. They ate separately,
but they were both back in Viola's car a little
after seven pm, heading back to Montgomery to pick up
more people who needed rides to Selma. The car full
(41:36):
of klansmen spotted them in a red light near the
Edmund Pettis Bridge. It was clear almost immediately that they
were being followed. FBI informant and klansman Gary Rowe claimed
that she evaded them with surprising speed, getting her oldsmobile
up to ninety miles an hour a few times. During
this twenty minute pursuit. Leroy Moten recalls that she hummed,
(42:03):
we shall overcome as she concentrated on the road, speeding
down the dark highway, trying desperately to make it back
to Montgomery with this carful of white men in hot pursuit.
Roe claims it was klansman Collie Wilkins who fired at
Biola when they finally caught up to her. She was
(42:24):
hit twice in the head. She was almost certainly already
dead when the car skidded into a ditch. Leroy Moten
was injured in the crash, but he'd not been shot.
He ran for three miles before he was picked up
by another vehicle ferrying marchers back to Selma. All four
(42:45):
klansmen from the car were arrested the very next day.
It was hardly a mystery to the FBI who'd done it.
Gary Rogue called Hiss FBI handler Liter that night.
Speaker 1 (42:55):
And told him.
Speaker 2 (42:56):
The two later met in a parking lot and the
gun Roe gave his hand that night was never admitted
into evidence. President Lyndon Johnson announced the arrest of Collie Wilkins,
Gary Rowe, William Eaton, and Eugene Thomas on TV the
very next day, but only three of them were charged.
FBI informant Gary Rowe testified against the other three klansmen.
(43:19):
All three of those clansmen were charged with murder by
the state courts in Alabama, and in a separate federal case,
they were indicted on charges of conspiracy to interfere with
civil rights. Those federal charges notably said nothing about murder.
The murder charges were just in the state courts in Alabama,
(43:42):
and a white jury in Alabama wouldn't convict a klansman.
Eaton ultimately died of a heart attack before he faced trial,
but Eugene Thomas was acquitted. Collie Wilkins, the man Row
accused of firing the fatal shot, was tried twice. The
first time, the all white jury voted unanimously against convicting
Wilkins of murder, but they were close to a conviction
(44:05):
on manslaughter.
Speaker 1 (44:06):
It was ten to two.
Speaker 2 (44:09):
Newspaper reports say the two holdouts that saved Wilkins from
prison told reporters that they just couldn't trust the testimony
of a man like Gary Rowe, not because he was
an admitted paid government informant, but because he was an oathbreaker.
He'd broken the oath he took as a klansman and
as klansmen themselves. That's something they took very seriously.
Speaker 1 (44:33):
Wilkins got a hung jury the first.
Speaker 2 (44:35):
Time around, and he was outright acquitted when they tried again.
When it came time to testify against his friends in
the federal trials, Roe was playing hard to get. I
don't know what was going on in his head, but
maybe he knew he had the FBI over a barrel here.
With the state murder trials ending without convictions, the federal
(44:56):
civil rights trial was the only way to lock anyone
up for this murder. They had put an FBI informant
on the stand to testify that he was there when
it happened. So it would be awfully shameful if everybody walked.
Speaker 1 (45:13):
In November of.
Speaker 2 (45:14):
Nineteen sixty five, a series of increasingly frantic FBI memos
sent directly to j Edgar Hoover outlined the problem. Gary
Rowe wanted more money, a lot of it. He wanted
thousands of dollars of debt paid off, unpaid alimony to
his wife, overdue power bills, months of delinquent rent on
(45:35):
his apartment, a few thousand for a failed business venture.
Pretty typical kinds of debts. But three grand and unpaid
bills in nineteen sixty five is more like thirty thousand
dollars today. Roe was in deep but when they put
him on the stand, they would have to admit that
he was a paid informant, which makes the records of
(45:58):
any payments made to him for that work relevant evidence
that they would have to produce. And it wouldn't look
great if they paid him thousands of dollars right before
a trial. And he didn't just want money. He wanted
a new life. He wanted to be relocated with his family.
(46:20):
He wanted the government to promise him not only that
he'd never be prosecuted for anything ever, but they'd never
make him testify again about anything.
Speaker 1 (46:29):
Never.
Speaker 2 (46:32):
As the trial date approached, the memos got weirder. In
late November, his handler described him as highly emotional, distraught,
and tearful during a meeting. He'd previously agreed to testify,
but now he's trying to back out, saying he felt
let down by the FBI and he no longer trusts
his handler. He alternated between saying that maybe they wouldn't
(46:55):
even want him to testify because he couldn't guarantee that
what he was going to say would be helpful, almost
implying that he planned to lie. And then he said
he just wouldn't go, that they'd have to subpoena him,
and even then they'd have to use physical force if
they wanted to get him back into a courtroom in Alabama.
Speaker 1 (47:14):
And then he started bargaining again.
Speaker 2 (47:16):
If the government could make him a series of promises,
he'd do it, but they had to promise that he
would never have to testify again, not about anything, not ever,
and he wanted a massive severance. He wanted his entire
family relocated, including his elderly parents, which would mean that
his father would have to be financially compensated for the
(47:38):
loss of employment that relocation would cause. Had It went
on and on, and some of them were pretty absurd,
But one thing he wouldn't budge on was he wanted
a job. Specifically, he demanded that the FBI get him
a job as a Border Patrol agent. In the end,
(48:01):
he got almost everything he asked for. After the three
clansmen were convicted on the federal civil rights charge, the
FBI paid Gary row ten thousand dollars, the equivalent of
over one hundred thousand dollars to day. He was given
a new identity and a job. He didn't quite get
(48:21):
his dream job with the Border Patrol, but he worked
for some time.
Speaker 1 (48:25):
As a U. S Marshal.
Speaker 2 (48:28):
A decade later, when Wilkins and Thomas were finally out
of prison, they went on a national news program to
accuse Gary Rowe of being the real trigger man. They
both passed polygraph exams or whatever that's worth to you,
and additional witnesses came forward, including two policemen who testified
before a grand jury that Roe had bragged about being
(48:52):
the one to kill Liuzou. The prosecution was halted by
a federal injunction. He'd been granted immunity. It didn't matter
how many witnesses came forward and gave sworn testimony that
they knew for a fact that he was the killer,
that they saw him do it, that there was evidence
that he'd done it, that he admitted to them that
(49:13):
he'd done it, that he bragged about it.
Speaker 1 (49:15):
It didn't matter.
Speaker 2 (49:17):
The FBI had given him complete and total immunity in
exchange for the testimony he gave that put three other
men in prison for a murder that he at the
very least participated in. The gun he gave his FBI
handler the night of the murder was never examined as evidence,
and the FBI had every reason to cover up the
(49:37):
possibility that they'd paid thousands of dollars to a murderer.
It wouldn't be the first time they'd done it or
the last. So to distract from the involvement of a
federal informant with a documented history of violence, the FBI
dragged the.
Speaker 1 (49:57):
Victim through the mud.
Speaker 2 (49:59):
They played up her arest record and called her a
terrible mother. They drew up an FBI memo claiming that
an examination of the body revealed needle marks on her arms,
and then they intentionally leaked the fake memo to the press,
never mind that the actual autopsy report made no such
finding and there were no drugs in her system. Her
(50:19):
husband and children were harassed, a cross was burned in
their yard in Detroit the week of her funeral, and
they reported receiving obscene phone calls for months. If Hoover
had his way, Biola Luzo would not be memorialized as
a loving mother who felt moved to fight for civil rights.
She'd be shamed as a lunatic who abandoned her children,
(50:40):
shot up heroin, and had adulterous inner racial sex, and
then was quickly forgotten. The clan killed Biola Luzo, but
the FBI tried to kill her memory. And it's really
the same as it ever was. As I'm writing this,
I just saw New York Times headline from today, Monday,
(51:01):
January twelfth, twenty twenty six. FBI inquiry into Ice shooting
is examining victims possible ties to activist groups. They're investigating
the victim because they already know everything they need to
know about the killer.
Speaker 1 (51:19):
He's on their payroll. If you've been to a.
Speaker 2 (51:23):
Protest anytime in the last fifty years or so you've
heard this chant.
Speaker 7 (51:32):
Think cop, thinkin non im, thinkin hend then hard.
Speaker 2 (51:40):
I think plank no man. Cops and clan go hand
in hand. The earliest mention of that exact phrase being
used as a protest chant that I could find was
in a newspaper article from nineteen seventy six. But I
really only spend a few minutes looking, and I'm certain
(52:03):
it predates the late seventies. I'm sure it was something
Black Southerners said quietly to one another for a long
time before it was ever chanted at a protest.
Speaker 1 (52:15):
But what does it mean.
Speaker 2 (52:17):
I've heard it chanted at local cops, sheriff's deputies, state police,
National guardsmen. I've heard it at clan rallies and school
board meetings. I've shouted at myself with lips that burned
with the taste of pepper spray.
Speaker 1 (52:32):
But what does it mean?
Speaker 2 (52:35):
I never really gave it a lot of thought. It's
just one of those things that makes perfect sense to
me and doesn't merit further consideration. But it could mean
a lot of things.
Speaker 1 (52:46):
Maybe it's just an.
Speaker 2 (52:47):
Abbreviated way of expressing that law enforcement and organized white
supremacist groups that engage in extra judicial violence exist along
a spectrum of racial violence, meeting out that violence on
subjugated groups with varying degrees of legitimacy and public approval.
Or maybe it's meant to be commentary on the historical
(53:08):
evolution of modern policing and the way that it grew
out of Antebellum slave patrols, thus quite literally positioning cops
as the modern successor to groups of violent racist vigilantes.
I've been an actual clan rallies where it seems to
be a cry of frustration that the police are clearly
serving and protecting the interests of the actual clan at
(53:28):
the expense of the community, and in ways that result
in violence towards those who oppose the clan. Or maybe
it's even further removed from the words themselves. Maybe it's
a metonomy where cops refers to the state in general,
and clan is any sort of extra judicial enforcement mechanism
of the darker whims of that state. That's probably broad
(53:50):
enough to hold all possible meanings. Maybe it's all of
those things or none of them, but it doesn't actually
matter because it's literal. It's not a metaphor, it's not hyperbole.
It's not taking liberties. It's not a joke. It is
the literal, factual, historical truth. Cops and clan do indeed
(54:15):
go hand in hand. When Caesar cow said, James Waller,
William Evan Simpson, Sandra Nilie Smith, and Michael Nathan were
gunned down in the streets of Greensboro, North Carolina, there
was a police informant in the car with the klansmen
and the Nazis who shot them, And there was a
police informant at the clan meetings where their murders were planned.
When Yola Luza was shot in the head in Selma, Alabama,
(54:37):
there was an FBI informant in the car with the
clansmen who killed her. When the Birmingham police found out
the Freedom Riders were coming in nineteen sixty one, they
conspired with the clan to attack buses full of civil
rights activists. Bull Connor told the clan they had fifteen
minutes of free reign. A police captain told the clansmen
on the FBI's payroll, you can beat them, bomb them,
(54:59):
Maimon kill I don't give a shit.
Speaker 1 (55:01):
There will be absolutely no arrests.
Speaker 2 (55:04):
And the FBI knew, and the FBI didn't stop it.
They didn't warn anyone about what was coming. When the
mob of klansmen firebombed those buses and beat the fleeing
passengers with pipes and bats and chains, it was the
FBI informant himself leading the mob. When Michael Schwerner, James Cheney,
Andrew Goodman were killed in Nishaba County, Mississippi, it was
(55:25):
a lynching coordinated and planned by local police who discussed
the plan not at their police station, but at their
clan meetings. When the clansmen who murdered four little girls
in a church basement in Birmingham was finally prosecuted, he
went to his grave insisting that he'd only purchased that
dynamite and it was his friend, the FBI informant, who
placed it beneath the steps at the sixteenth Street Baptist Church,
(55:47):
killing Addie May Collin, Cynthia Wesley, Carroll Robertson, and Carroll
to niece McNair. He was never made to answer for
that accusation, but he was the same FBI informant who
later admitted to murdering a black man whose name he
couldn't even remember. When klansmen rioted in Myrtle Beach in
nineteen fifty, and one of their own was killed by
friendly fire as that crowd of masked races fired hundreds
(56:08):
of bullets into a black owned bar. They took their
fallen brother to the hospital, and when they stripped the
white robe off his dead body, he was still wearing
his policeman's uniform underneath. For decades, the federal government paid
klansmen to do their dirty work. They've used klansmen and
neo Nazis and right wing extremists of all stripes to
(56:28):
disrupt progressive movements. They've ignored credible intelligence about murders and
bombings they could have stopped, and they looked the other
way when their informants participated in violence against people they
thought posed a greater threat to the status quo. And
they've always thought liberty, equality, freedom, tolerance, diversity, and civil
(56:49):
rights were far more threatening than bombs in church basements
and lynchings on dark, abandoned highways.
Speaker 1 (56:57):
The comps the clan have.
Speaker 2 (56:59):
Always worked hand in hand to share the burden of
violently enforcing white supremacy, whether the klansman's FBI checks or
off the books, or the fascist foot soldier is getting
a W two from DHS. The violence is the same,
the goal is the same. They're doing what they've always done,
and so will we. I don't know exactly how long
(57:22):
this moral arc of the universe is, but never forget
you aren't the first to throw your shoulder into it,
determined to see it bent towards justice.
Speaker 1 (57:50):
Read Little Guys as a production of Cool Zone Media
and iHeartRadio. It's researched, written and recorded by me Molly Conger.
Our executive producers are Sophie Lichterman and Robert Evans. The
show is at a by the wildly talented Rory Gagan.
The theme music was composed by Brad Dickert.
Speaker 2 (58:04):
You can email me at Weird Little Guys podcast at
gmail dot com. I will definitely read it, but I
probably won't answer.
Speaker 1 (58:09):
It's nothing personal.
Speaker 2 (58:11):
You can exchange conspiracy theories about the show with other
listeners on the Weird Little Guys Subreddy. Just don't post
anything that's going to make you one of my Weird
Little Guys.
Wo Zone media.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
Before her children even knew their mother had been killed,
the federal government was already busy rewriting the story of
her death. She had lived a good life.
Speaker 1 (00:18):
Though not a long one.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
She was happily remarried after a divorce, and despite the
demands of motherhood, she went back to school in her thirties.
People who loved her described her as a Christian woman,
a devoted mother, and someone who believed passionately in loving everyone,
so much so that she put that belief into action.
(00:42):
And as the FBI commandeered the investigation into her death,
her grieving spouse was left trying to explain what had
happened to her children. Her youngest was just six years old.
She had both hands on the steering wheel when she was.
Speaker 1 (00:59):
Shot in the head.
Speaker 2 (01:01):
She was dead before her car came to a stop,
crashing not far from the spot where her killer had
fired at her. The person she was traveling with that
day was miraculously not hit. There should have been no
way to spin it. The investigation revealed the shooter and
his motive almost immediately, but federal officials seated doubt, planning
(01:24):
stories in the media that she was sexually immoral that
she neglected her children, that her spouse was a person
with questionable associates, she was an extremist, an outside agitator,
she had dangerous left wing politics, and she might even
be a communist. She was sick, degenerate, and she brought
(01:45):
this on herself. Of course, the FBI director spreading these
lies about her knew they weren't true. But in March
of nineteen sixty five, Jay Edgar Hoover was desperate to
distract from the fact that one of the clans man
who killed Viola the USO, was on his pay room.
(02:06):
I'm Molly Conger, and this is We're gude of guys.
(02:28):
This is not the story I promised you last week.
Speaker 1 (02:31):
I'm so sorry. I'm sure you already guessed that. I know.
Speaker 2 (02:37):
I ended last week's episode with a teaser for something
fairly specific, and I will write that episode.
Speaker 1 (02:44):
I will.
Speaker 2 (02:46):
It's poor form to complain about a job I do
in my pajamas, but it's not easy writing what is
essentially a twenty five page research paper on a new
topic every week. The only way it works is to
write about something.
Speaker 1 (02:59):
I'm genuinely.
Speaker 2 (03:01):
And I'm so lucky that I get to do that,
but my heart's got to be in it, and this
week my heart was troubled. I usually finished writing pretty
late on a Monday night Tuesday morning, if we're being
specific about it. My editor Rory really only gets about
(03:23):
a day and a half with the file to clean
it up, put the music in it, and bed the
audio clips and work whatever magic that he does that.
Speaker 1 (03:30):
Makes it sound good.
Speaker 2 (03:32):
And the edit I listened to on Wednesday afternoon is
the one you hear Thursday morning. It's a tight timeline,
so I really have to lock in on what I'm
going to research and write about pretty early in the week.
And obviously I knew what I was going to be
working on for this week's episode because it was a
continuation of the story from last week's.
Speaker 3 (03:52):
Episode until it wasn't On Tuesdays, I've usually been up
most of the night, so I don't get a lot done.
Speaker 2 (04:03):
I try to run all my errands for the week
on Wednesdays, but by Thursday I'm already starting to feel
like I'm running out of time and it's way too
late to change my plans. I've got to lock myself
in my office and focus on the topic I've chosen.
I was supposed to be writing about that Nazi serial killer.
I promised you, But this past week we all watched
(04:26):
a woman die on Wednesday, and I still ran my errands.
It's the only day I have time for it. But
I went about my business in kind of a daze,
and I wept for her, for her wife, for her children,
for all of us, for the world we have to
live in. But we all still had to get up
(04:47):
and go to work the next day. So on Thursday
and I sat at my computer and I kept taking
notes for the episode I was trying to write. On Friday,
more video of that murder came out.
Speaker 1 (05:01):
I watched it.
Speaker 2 (05:03):
Maybe you did too. If you didn't, you don't have to.
There's no moral requirement for you to bear witness in
that way.
Speaker 1 (05:12):
I promise you.
Speaker 2 (05:14):
But I did because I always do. And it hit
me pretty hard for the obvious reasons. Right, I was
watching a murder. I find myself doing that not infrequently
in this line of work, and it never gets easier,
and if it does, I'll quit. But something in particular
(05:39):
was stuck rattling around in my head. In the moments
before a federal agent shot and killed Renee Good, she
smiled at him, and she said, that's fine, dude, I'm.
Speaker 1 (05:53):
Not mad at you.
Speaker 2 (05:56):
That's a striking moment, even just on its own. She
really wasn't angry. You can see her face. She's brave,
she's determined, but she's telling the truth.
Speaker 1 (06:12):
She isn't mad.
Speaker 2 (06:15):
Her presence there wasn't out of anger but love. She
isn't mad at this particular man. She's doing her part
against an injustice that's bigger than either of them. This
isn't a show about current events. This isn't a show
about the news. This isn't an episode about Renee Good.
(06:39):
That's not what I write about, and that's not what
you're here to listen to. But it isn't my fault
that history rhymes. I wish it didn't. I wish the
decade I've spent writing about white supremacist violence wasn't increasingly
relevant in the way I think about current events.
Speaker 1 (06:58):
But it is.
Speaker 2 (07:01):
And when I watched that video, I didn't just see
Renee Good. I saw Viola Luzo. And when I heard
Renee Good speak her last words, I didn't just hear her.
I heard Michael Schwerner. Michael Schwerner, James Cheney, and Andrew
Goodman were field workers with the Congress of Racial Equality,
(07:24):
and on June twenty first, nineteen sixty four, they were
murdered by a mob of klansmen that included members of
the local sheriff's department. When Alton Wayne Roberts pulled Michael
Schwerner from his car, he asked him, are you that
N word lover? The two men were face to face,
(07:45):
just inches apart. The klansmen had both of his hands
on Schwerner's shoulders, having spun him around to look him
in the eye, and Schwerner, a twenty four year old
Jewish social worker from New York City, looked back at
that clan and he said, Sir, I know just how
you feel. He was calm, he wasn't angry. He was
(08:10):
trying to start a conversation.
Speaker 1 (08:12):
I think.
Speaker 2 (08:14):
I guess we can't really know what kind of dialogue
he was trying to have, because that's as far as
he got. The klansman still had one hand on one
of Schwerner's shoulders when he used his other hand to
draw his gun, and he shot Michael Schwerner point blank
in the chest, killing him instantly. And I thought, too
of Margaret Ann Nott, who was just sixteen years old
(08:36):
when she was killed in Butler, Alabama, in nineteen seventy one.
She was sitting on the ground with her eyes closed
in silent prayer when she was hit by the car
that rammed into the permitted protest she was participating in
that morning. As Margaret lay on the ground dying, she
repeated over and over again, I died for freedom.
Speaker 1 (09:00):
I died for freedom.
Speaker 2 (09:03):
And I thought too of Talisian non Kai Mech, who,
along with Ricky John Best, was one of two men
who died trying to protect two teenage girls on a
train in Portland in twenty seventeen. A Somali immigrant, a
young black Muslim girl wearing her hyjab, was being threatened,
and those strangers gave their lives to stop a neo
Nazi from hurting her. And after Tualisian was stabbed, as
(09:29):
he lay there bleeding out in the lap of a
stranger on the floor of the train, his last words were,
tell everyone on this train, I love them. I'm not
mad at you. I know just how you feel. I
(09:49):
died for freedom. Tell everyone on this train, I love them.
Speaker 1 (09:56):
I'm not mad at you. I'm not mad at you.
I know just how you feel. I'm not mad at you.
Speaker 2 (10:07):
Their words, all of them, the last words of people
killed by Nazis and klansmen and agents of the state
who served the same ends as those Nazis and those clansmen,
were drowning out my own thoughts. And I was reading
and writing and trying to do my silly little job,
trying to think my own thoughts. But I couldn't hear
(10:29):
my own thoughts over the sound of the blood pounding
in my head. And it sounded like Renee Good. It
sounded like Michael Schwerner.
Speaker 3 (10:39):
It sounded like.
Speaker 2 (10:40):
Delesian and Margaret and Ricky and Viola and Heather Higher
and so many people who woke up on a day
they didn't know as their last, and they did something brave,
not because they were angry or violent, but because they
loved the very idea of love so much.
Speaker 1 (11:04):
And I didn't write a word that day.
Speaker 2 (11:09):
On Saturday night, I was sitting in my office with
a book in my lap and thirty eight browser tabs
open on my computer, still trying to figure out how
I'm going to write six thousand words about anything this week.
And I saw a video of a vigil for Renee
Good held on a rainy Friday evening in New Hampshire.
(11:29):
Rob Hirschfeld, the Bishop of the Episcopal Church of New Hampshire,
must have spent the day hearing the same inescapable litany
of names that was pounding in my own head, because
he reminded the crowd in New Hampshire of Jonathan Daniels,
a New Hampshire native who died in a corner store
in a tiny town outside Montgomery, Alabama, in August of
(11:50):
nineteen sixty five. Daniels was a seminarian, still a year
away from finishing his studies before he could pursue ordination,
and he'd spent the spring semester of nineteen sixty five
working in Selma, Alabama. He returned to Alabama during his
summer break that year to register voters, tutor children, and
(12:12):
help black families get to church. He went back to
Alabama that summer to do what he felt God had
called him to. When the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee staged
a protest outside of a whites only department store in
Fort Deposit, Alabama. He was one of thirty protesters who
were arrested. After six days in jail. The whole group
(12:35):
was released, but they were left stranded in the middle
of nowhere. While they were waiting there for the ride
back to town, the group decided to send a small delegation
to a nearby corner store to buy some cold sodas
they'd all spent six days sweating in an Alabama jail
and this was one of the only stores in the
(12:56):
area that would serve black customers. Jonathan Daniels and father
Richard Morris Row walked to the store with Joyce Bailey
and Ruby Sales, two black teenage girls, both activists with
the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Ruby Sales, just seventeen years
old that summer, reached the door first. She recalled that
(13:20):
afternoon in an interview for a PBS documentary two decades later.
Speaker 4 (13:26):
And so when we got to the store, as we
approached a store and began to go up the steps,
suddenly standing there was Tom Coleman that at that time
I didn't know his name. I found that out later,
(13:47):
and I recognized that he had a shotgun, and I
recognized that he was yelling something about black bitches. But
in some real ways, with that confrontation, my mind kind
of blinked, and I wasn't processing all that was happening.
And so as I was trying to process the meaning
(14:08):
of this, suddenly I fell a tug because I was
in front and Jonathan was behind me, and I fell
a tug and someone and the next thing I knew,
there was this blast and I had fallen down, and
I remember thinking, God, this is what it feels like
(14:28):
to be dead. I thought I was dead, And just
as I was trying to sort of deal with being dead,
I heard another shot go off.
Speaker 1 (14:44):
But she wasn't dead.
Speaker 2 (14:47):
The shot Ruby heard as she was lying on the
ground contemplating her own apparent death was meant for Joyce,
but Father Morris Row had wrapped himself around her as
he turned to run.
Speaker 1 (15:01):
Only Joyce got away.
Speaker 2 (15:04):
The priest was shot in the back, leaving him unable
to walk for several years. The first blast from the
deputy's shotgun, the one aimed straight at Ruby, hadn't touched her.
The tug, she felt. The force that knocked her to
the ground, where she now lay covered in blood, had
(15:24):
been Jonathan Daniels pushing her out of the way, and
the blood pooling around her was his. He'd taken the
full force of the shotgun blast point blank, killing him instantly.
In the video of that rainy vigil in New Hampshire,
Bishop Hirschfeld shared the story of Jonathan Daniel's death to
(15:47):
make it inescapably clear how serious he was as a
man of the cloth. Thoughts and prayers are sort of
his stock in trade. At a vigil like that one,
that's all anyone really expects of him. His thoughts and
his prayers, that's all anyone really has to offer after
(16:07):
a tragedy. But the Bishop opened his remarks by wondering
whether the time for eloquent words had passed. Thoughts and
prayers are beautiful, but they aren't moving the needle. Jonathan
Daniels didn't fight for civil rights with a strongly worded
letter or a signature on a petition, or a beautiful
(16:30):
sermon from the pulpit. He pressed his body into the
barrel of a shotgun.
Speaker 5 (16:39):
I have told the clergy of the Episcopal Dioceis of
New Hampshire that we may be entering into that same witness,
and I've asked them to get their affairs in order.
Speaker 6 (16:56):
To make sure they have their wills written, because it
may be that now is no longer the time for statements,
but for us, with our bodies, to stand between the
powers of this world and the most vulnerable.
Speaker 2 (17:23):
I watched that video on Saturday night, and I thought
about what it means to live in a world where
his words are frightening and comforting to me an equal measure.
I hope the clergy of the Episcopal Diocese of New
Hampshire don't die the way Jonathan Daniels died. But more
than that, I wish we did not live in a
world where a shotgun is pointed.
Speaker 1 (17:43):
At a child. But we do, and they might.
Speaker 2 (17:46):
And while we try to untangle the factors that led
to the loaded gun aimed the most vulnerable among us,
maybe the best we can hope for is the courage
to absorb some of that pain. I woke up Sday
morning and the first thing I saw on my phone
was the news that a synagogue in Mississippi had burned.
Terrible news, the kind of news I will definitely follow
(18:10):
up on eventually. Whoever would do something like that as
almost certainly the kind of guy I write about or
will one day.
Speaker 1 (18:19):
I wasn't quite.
Speaker 2 (18:20):
Awake yet, but I recognized the name of the synagogue. Impossible. Really,
I'm not Jewish, and I've never been to Mississippi, but
beth Is Reel Congregation and Jackson, Mississippi, sounded so familiar
because it was bombed by the Klan in nineteen sixty seven.
Everything old is new again. There's nothing new.
Speaker 1 (18:40):
Under the sun.
Speaker 2 (18:41):
And I was running out of time to write something
for this week's episode, and it felt like history was
demanding to be acknowledged. I stared at my computer for
a while, and on Sunday afternoon, I went to a
vigil for Renee Good. It was held in a little
park downtown. Hundreds of people filled the park, spilling out
(19:04):
onto the sidewalks. I saw friends and neighbors and strangers,
babies and strollers and old women pushing walkers. I saw
the pastor of a church in my neighborhood wearing a
rainbow scarf and a warm smile. I saw the man
running to be my congressman, standing quietly in the crowd,
(19:26):
not campaigning, just present. People had homemade signs. Some of
them were impressive works of art, and others were hastily
repurposed from the last protest. I saw a child wearing
a cardboard box painted white. It was a little ice
cube costume with third graders against ice scrawled on the
(19:49):
back in pink marker. And I saw an older woman
carrying a single sheet of plain printer paper with a
phrase written on it in a black marker. It said,
you can't kill us all. That's what one of Renee's
neighbors shouted at the ice agents, trying to chase off
(20:11):
the crowd that gathered at the scene after she was
shot and killed. Instead of running away from the sound
of gunfire, a crowd formed, bearing witness and demanding justice.
Before her body was even cold. They had just witnessed
an execution, and their answer was you can't kill us All.
(20:36):
Those words spoken by an ordinary person in an extraordinary circumstance,
traveled halfway across the country to be there on that sign,
a sign carried by another entirely ordinary person, an ordinary
person who recognizes that she too, now finds herself in
an extraordinary circumstance. Normally I make careful notes of what
(21:02):
was said and who spoke. But I just paced, walking
laps around that two hundred square foot patch of grass,
feeling like the weight of history would crush us all.
Walking home afterwards, I knew I wouldn't write another word
that day. I don't have to walk down Fourth Street
(21:23):
to get home, but I always do. It's been almost
nine years since a woman I never met was killed there.
There's a purple bow tied around the post holding up
a no parking sign. Closest to the spot where she died.
The brick wall of the neighboring office building is covered
in chalk messages. I guess it's mostly sheltered from the
(21:46):
rain somehow, because it isn't derotating changing set of messages.
It's a monument. Maybe it's never rained at an angle
in that narrow street. I don't understand it. There are
thousands of little men messages scrawled on the walls on
either side of Fourth Street, but the biggest one reads.
Speaker 1 (22:06):
Gone but not forgotten. And I know that.
Speaker 2 (22:10):
One's been untouched for at least eight years.
Speaker 1 (22:13):
Maybe it's older than that.
Speaker 2 (22:14):
But the first time I remember seeing it was when
I stopped by on her birthday, May twenty ninth, twenty eighteen.
Heather Hier would have been thirty three that day if
she hadn't been dead for a year. So after the
(22:43):
vigil for Renee Good, I stopped on the street where
Heather Higher was killed, and I stood in the street
where she died with tears in my eyes.
Speaker 1 (22:51):
Until a car came.
Speaker 2 (22:54):
And then I remembered that we all still have to
live in the world and go about our business. So
what I mean to say is, as I'm writing this,
it's Monday. I do most of my writing on Mondays.
It's a bad habit, but usually when I'm writing on Monday,
I've spent all week researching and taking notes, and I
(23:16):
kind of have an idea what the words will be.
But I woke up this morning and I started over.
Because every time I sat down to research and take
notes and plot out the story I was supposed to
write this week, I cried. I cried for Renee and
for Heather, and for Michael Schwerner and James Cheney and
(23:38):
Andrew Goodman and Mayola Luso and Talisian and Ricky and
Margaret and Jonathan, and for all the martyrs of the
struggle for freedom whose stories we don't know, not yet.
I couldn't write a regular episode of my show because
my heart demanded something else. I know this isn't a
serious job. I make an entertainment product. I'm a journalist
(24:02):
and a researcher, and I take my work very seriously.
But I'm not delusional. This is a podcast. It's in
your ear on your way to work, while you wash dishes,
walk your dog. But if I didn't believe just a
little bit this was important, I would have given up
(24:23):
by now. I wouldn't work this hard to write these
stories if I didn't think there was some value in
understanding the history of writing political violence, in fitting those
pieces together to show the connections between these allegedly isolated,
random acts of violence. As bewildering and terrifying and overwhelming
as things seem right now, I want to help you
(24:46):
see that these are not unprecedented times.
Speaker 1 (24:50):
They are, in fact, very.
Speaker 2 (24:52):
Precedented, and the precedents are pretty dark, but there are
things we can learn from the past, and there's comfort
in knowing we aren't the first ones to walk into
this darkness. So I didn't write the story I promised
you last week. And I can't tell you anything you
(25:12):
don't already know about what's in the news today. But
I can tell you a little bit about a story
that rhymes. I can tell you about the day Viola
le Uso died. On March twenty fifth, nineteen sixty five,
marchers poured into Montgomery, Alabama. The front of the march
(25:35):
reached the capitol steps around noon, but the crowd of
more than twenty five thousand stretched out over two miles long,
and the end of the march didn't arrive until more
than an hour later. A program from the event lists
more than a dozen speakers. There were speakers from the
Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Congress for Racial Equality, the NAACP.
(25:58):
John Lewis spoke on behalf of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.
Nobel Peace Prize winner and New and Under Secretary General
Ralph Bunch gave a speech. A Philip Randolph spoke the
march from Selma to Montgomery had been hard fought. It
took nineteen days to cross those fifty four miles. On
(26:20):
the first attempt, the march didn't even make it out
of Selma. It ended the very day it began, a
day that quickly became known as Bloody Sunday. Dozens of
marchers were injured and seventeen were hospitalized after brutal beatings
from the police waiting for them on the other side
of the Edmund Pettis Bridge. The second attempt was quickly
(26:41):
foiled by a court injunction. Hours after the march was
called off, a white mob attacked three Unitarian ministers who
were in town for the march. James Reeb died from
his injuries. By the time the march to Montgomery started
for the third time, the stakes were clear. A minister
(27:02):
had been beaten to death. The chairman of the Student
on Violent Coordinating Committee had been struck over the head
with a billy club, fracturing a skull. They'd been beaten
and tearcass and run down with horses and dogs. They
knew they would face violence, they understood they may face death.
(27:24):
And when they finally reached Montgomery, the main event that
afternoon was a speech from doctor Martin.
Speaker 1 (27:29):
Luther King Junior. You may not know this one, at
least not as well as you know.
Speaker 2 (27:35):
Famous speech is like I have a dream from the
march on Washington, or I've been to the mountaintop from
the Memphis sanitation worker strike. But I think you know
one of the final lines of this speech.
Speaker 7 (27:51):
I contemplated this afternoon. I have a difficult moment. I
have a substrate in Vialla it will not be, because
truth pressures will rise again. A long not long it
cause no lie can near frail. A long not law alone.
(28:14):
It calls you shall read what your soul A long
way on the scaffold, long way up on the thing
that's just that scaffold, sway the future behind the dim
unknown standard, God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own.
Speaker 4 (28:33):
A long not law of the moral.
Speaker 7 (28:38):
Universe is long, but it ben towards the outside.
Speaker 2 (28:46):
The art of the moral universe is long, but it
bends towards justice. That's one of doctor King's more famous lines.
And I think there's a reason I've only ever heard
it out of context. Why I never really thought about
it having been spoken on the afternoon of March twenty fifth,
nineteen sixty five, from the steps of the Capitol Building
(29:08):
in Montgomery, Alabama, flanked on either side by civil rights
activists with fresh bruises on their faces. When you neatly
cut around those words and you lift them out of
that speech, carving away the context of the bloody fifty
four miles between Selma and Montgomery, you might think moral
arcs just spend that way, that the natural shape of
(29:31):
such an ark just tends to angle in the direction
of justice, that if you wait patiently, that gentle curve
will end, and there at its tip will be justice.
But the moral arc of the universe doesn't bent.
Speaker 1 (29:48):
It is bent.
Speaker 2 (29:50):
It is pushed and pled and molded and hammered and kneaded,
and it disgreased with our blood.
Speaker 1 (29:58):
It doesn't bent.
Speaker 2 (30:00):
We have to bend it. It is not enough to
observe its shape. You have to throw your body against it.
You have to look back at that long arc and
remember who toiled and struggled and cried and bled before you.
That arc bends because you were not the first person
who wished that it did, because we are not the
(30:22):
first generation to put our shoulder to it and push.
Speaker 1 (30:27):
Viola Luzo knew that.
Speaker 2 (30:30):
She was there that afternoon in Montgomery. She heard doctor
King give that speech just a few hours before she died. Now,
normally I would have at least skimmed most of the
biographies that have been written about her. There are a
couple books about her life, and I would try to
(30:51):
sort of suss out the angle that each of the
authors was approaching the story with and cross reference the
details that didn't quite match with newspaper articles and interviews
with people who were there. That's my normal approach. Normally
I work on an episode all week. As I said,
I started this morning, so he didn't quite have time
(31:14):
for the normal process. So forgive me if her life
story is a little lighter on the details. What I
did read, though, was the chapter on Viola written in
a book by Reverend Jack Mendelssohn. He published a book
of stories about civil rights martyrs in nineteen sixty six,
so the interviews he had with people who knew Viola
were fresh. He was writing this just a few months
(31:37):
after she died, And of course I also read Jay
Edgar Hoover's frantic and furious memos as he cooked up
his smear campaign against this dead mother. Yola was born
in Pennsylvania nineteen twenty five, the daughter of a school
teacher and a coal miner. Her father lost a hand
in a mining accident during the Great Depression, so the
(31:59):
family relied on income from short term teaching positions. Her
mother took anywhere she could find them. They moved often,
but Viola spent much of her childhood in the South.
At eighteen, she married a much older man, her boss
at the restaurant where she worked. When they divorced six
years later, she kept custody of their two daughters. In
(32:21):
nineteen fifty one, she married Anthony Luzo, a business agent
for Teamsters Local two forty seven, and the couple had
three more children together. After she died, those who wanted
to minimize her death would say that she was mentally ill,
she had a criminal record, she was a bad mother,
(32:43):
she was crazy, and her interest in civil rights was
a recent flight of fancy, perhaps a symptom of her
erratic mind. Now, I would argue that even someone with
a criminal record and a mental illness can have a
firmly held belief in the value of civil rights and
make their own decision to participate in a political protest,
(33:03):
and either way it certainly isn't a reason to kill them.
But in Viola's case, I think the people repeating those
things are being unfair on purpose. I think they know
they're lying. Now, it is kind of true that she
had a criminal record. She'd been cited for failing to
(33:26):
send three of her children to school. In nineteen sixty four,
she kept them home for forty days to protest a
school policy that allowed teenagers to drop out of school.
Without parental permission. I don't fully understand the logic of
the protest, but the cause makes perfect sense. She told
(33:46):
the Detroit Board of Education that she regretted leaving school
at fourteen, and she wished the law had kept her
in school. She believed that requiring children to stay in
school until eighteen would protect them from being exploded. She
was charged with violating the state school compulsory age law,
the one she was protesting. Years later, her daughter Penny
(34:10):
explained to author Mary Stanton that it wasn't some hysterical,
unreasonable thing. It was a carefully considered, active protest. She
was trying to get publicity and draw attention to what
she thought was a dangerous law that would hurt children.
A few weeks after her arrest in June of nineteen
(34:31):
sixty four, maybe in an effort to just blow off
some steam, she took off on an impromptu road trip
without telling her husband. This, coupled with the arrest, provided
the pieces for the narrative that she was irrational and
mentally disturbed. Newspapers seized on this line from an FBI
(34:52):
memo about how she disappeared to Canada and her husband
had to report her missing, but they lived in Michigan.
Canada is just kind of the next town over. It
does appear that her interest in civil rights came on suddenly.
She never brought it up before nineteen sixty four. But
(35:13):
nineteen sixty four was as good a time as any
for a housewife in Detroit to become interested in the
civil rights movement. She didn't just wake up one day
and drive to Selma. She had been involved in the
Detroit chapter of the NAACP for a year leading up
to her death. Honestly, I think it might be more
unusual for a white housewife in Michigan to be outspoken
(35:34):
about segregation earlier than this.
Speaker 1 (35:38):
It makes perfect sense that she.
Speaker 2 (35:39):
Would develop an interest in the civil rights movement at
the height of the civil rights movement. I don't understand
why this is meant to be suspicious. It was bloody
Sunday that finally spurred her to greater action. She was
active locally, but the footage of the violence on the
Edmund Pettis Bridge and March of nineteen sixty five was
(36:02):
too much. Her husband recalls the tears streaming down her
face when she saw it on the evening news. When
James Ree was murdered a few days later. She attended
a memorial service for him at her local Unitarian church.
Later that week, she marched with a few hundred students
from Wayne State University to show their solidarity with the
(36:23):
marchers in Selma. At that rally, she heard several students
who'd been down in Selma speak about their experiences. They
described the way the deputies laughed and sneered at them
on bloody Sunday, saying those cops were just like the
men who murdered James Reeb, except they'd been deputized by
(36:43):
the state to do it. After that march, she called
her husband. She'd made up her mind and she was
going to Selma. That's not unreasonable. That's not something you
(37:12):
would only do if you were on drugs or in
the grips of a serious psychiatric episode. It doesn't even
seem that surprising to me. She wasn't the only person
who did this. She'd been interested in the civil rights
movement for a year. She was involved with the NAACP
and the Unitarian Church. She marched in Detroit in solidarity
(37:33):
with Selma, and she heard the impassioned pleas for help
from the people who'd been there. They wanted more people
to go back down to Alabama with them to join
the march to Montgomery. So she did, that's not crazy.
(37:53):
I can see myself doing something like that. I think
a lot of us can. It's not your fight, her
husband told her, but she disagreed. She told her family
it's everyone's fight. Viola spent six days in Alabama, the
(38:16):
last six days of her life. She got in touch
with organizers at the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and they
put her to work shuttling people back and forth between
Selma and Montgomery. When the march began, Viola march too.
She walked across the Edmund Pettis Bridge, just two weeks
after sobbing on the couch at home in Detroit watching
(38:37):
the news of bloody Sunday. The night before the march
reached Montgomery, Biola was volunteering with the medics at Saint
Jude's Catholic Church just outside the city. She spent the
evening gently dressing the bloody feet of marchers who'd walked
barefoot on this pilgrimage. Father Timothy D. C offered her
(38:58):
one of the cots in the church basement. She said
there were people who needed it more than she did,
and she slept alone in her car. On the morning
of March twenty fifth, she asked Father d C if
there was anywhere she could go to get a good.
Speaker 1 (39:13):
Look at where they were headed.
Speaker 2 (39:15):
So he took her up to the church bell tower,
and together they looked out over the landscape, and they
could see the line of marchers already streaming from Saint
Jude's heading out for the four mile walk to the capitol.
Howl Dec says she got pale and anxious, and she
turned to him and she said that suddenly she felt
very sure that someone would die that day. But they
(39:40):
prayed together and that seemed to ease her fears. And
as she walked away from Saint Jude's that morning, she
slipped off her shoes so she could make the final
leg of the march into Montgomery barefoot. That evening, she
was back at Saint Jude's. Leroy Moten, a local actor
of us she'd been working with all week, took her
(40:02):
car from the church and drove back into Montgomery to
pick up a group of marchers who needed a ride
back to Selma. Biola called her husband and her children
every night during that trip, and this night was no different.
One of her daughters later recalled hearing the sounds of
celebration in the background when her mom called that last time,
(40:23):
everybody was celebrating the march.
Speaker 1 (40:26):
Had been successful.
Speaker 2 (40:29):
She must have been calling from Saint Jude's. After the
march was over, but before she got into her car
for the last time, Biola told her husband she'd be
leaving very soon, and she asked him to wire her
fifty dollars for the trip home. On the way to Selma,
in the car with Leroy Mowten, another car tailgated them aggressively.
(40:52):
She'd been warned this was a possibility. There were white
men driving around just looking for any car that had
both black and white people in side, particularly cars with
a white woman and a black man. Viola seemed unbothered
by the tailgating, though, and she joked with Leroy about
how she'd like to come back to visit Alabama again
(41:13):
one day if she didn't get killed. In the meantime,
after they dropped off the first batch of passengers in Selma,
Leroy and Viola took a break for dinner. They ate separately,
but they were both back in Viola's car a little
after seven pm, heading back to Montgomery to pick up
more people who needed rides to Selma. The car full
(41:36):
of klansmen spotted them in a red light near the
Edmund Pettis Bridge. It was clear almost immediately that they
were being followed. FBI informant and klansman Gary Rowe claimed
that she evaded them with surprising speed, getting her oldsmobile
up to ninety miles an hour a few times. During
this twenty minute pursuit. Leroy Moten recalls that she hummed,
(42:03):
we shall overcome as she concentrated on the road, speeding
down the dark highway, trying desperately to make it back
to Montgomery with this carful of white men in hot pursuit.
Roe claims it was klansman Collie Wilkins who fired at
Biola when they finally caught up to her. She was
(42:24):
hit twice in the head. She was almost certainly already
dead when the car skidded into a ditch. Leroy Moten
was injured in the crash, but he'd not been shot.
He ran for three miles before he was picked up
by another vehicle ferrying marchers back to Selma. All four
(42:45):
klansmen from the car were arrested the very next day.
It was hardly a mystery to the FBI who'd done it.
Gary Rogue called Hiss FBI handler Liter that night.
Speaker 1 (42:55):
And told him.
Speaker 2 (42:56):
The two later met in a parking lot and the
gun Roe gave his hand that night was never admitted
into evidence. President Lyndon Johnson announced the arrest of Collie Wilkins,
Gary Rowe, William Eaton, and Eugene Thomas on TV the
very next day, but only three of them were charged.
FBI informant Gary Rowe testified against the other three klansmen.
(43:19):
All three of those clansmen were charged with murder by
the state courts in Alabama, and in a separate federal case,
they were indicted on charges of conspiracy to interfere with
civil rights. Those federal charges notably said nothing about murder.
The murder charges were just in the state courts in Alabama,
(43:42):
and a white jury in Alabama wouldn't convict a klansman.
Eaton ultimately died of a heart attack before he faced trial,
but Eugene Thomas was acquitted. Collie Wilkins, the man Row
accused of firing the fatal shot, was tried twice. The
first time, the all white jury voted unanimously against convicting
Wilkins of murder, but they were close to a conviction
(44:05):
on manslaughter.
Speaker 1 (44:06):
It was ten to two.
Speaker 2 (44:09):
Newspaper reports say the two holdouts that saved Wilkins from
prison told reporters that they just couldn't trust the testimony
of a man like Gary Rowe, not because he was
an admitted paid government informant, but because he was an oathbreaker.
He'd broken the oath he took as a klansman and
as klansmen themselves. That's something they took very seriously.
Speaker 1 (44:33):
Wilkins got a hung jury the first.
Speaker 2 (44:35):
Time around, and he was outright acquitted when they tried again.
When it came time to testify against his friends in
the federal trials, Roe was playing hard to get. I
don't know what was going on in his head, but
maybe he knew he had the FBI over a barrel here.
With the state murder trials ending without convictions, the federal
(44:56):
civil rights trial was the only way to lock anyone
up for this murder. They had put an FBI informant
on the stand to testify that he was there when
it happened. So it would be awfully shameful if everybody walked.
Speaker 1 (45:13):
In November of.
Speaker 2 (45:14):
Nineteen sixty five, a series of increasingly frantic FBI memos
sent directly to j Edgar Hoover outlined the problem. Gary
Rowe wanted more money, a lot of it. He wanted
thousands of dollars of debt paid off, unpaid alimony to
his wife, overdue power bills, months of delinquent rent on
(45:35):
his apartment, a few thousand for a failed business venture.
Pretty typical kinds of debts. But three grand and unpaid
bills in nineteen sixty five is more like thirty thousand
dollars today. Roe was in deep but when they put
him on the stand, they would have to admit that
he was a paid informant, which makes the records of
(45:58):
any payments made to him for that work relevant evidence
that they would have to produce. And it wouldn't look
great if they paid him thousands of dollars right before
a trial. And he didn't just want money. He wanted
a new life. He wanted to be relocated with his family.
(46:20):
He wanted the government to promise him not only that
he'd never be prosecuted for anything ever, but they'd never
make him testify again about anything.
Speaker 1 (46:29):
Never.
Speaker 2 (46:32):
As the trial date approached, the memos got weirder. In
late November, his handler described him as highly emotional, distraught,
and tearful during a meeting. He'd previously agreed to testify,
but now he's trying to back out, saying he felt
let down by the FBI and he no longer trusts
his handler. He alternated between saying that maybe they wouldn't
(46:55):
even want him to testify because he couldn't guarantee that
what he was going to say would be helpful, almost
implying that he planned to lie. And then he said
he just wouldn't go, that they'd have to subpoena him,
and even then they'd have to use physical force if
they wanted to get him back into a courtroom in Alabama.
Speaker 1 (47:14):
And then he started bargaining again.
Speaker 2 (47:16):
If the government could make him a series of promises,
he'd do it, but they had to promise that he
would never have to testify again, not about anything, not ever,
and he wanted a massive severance. He wanted his entire
family relocated, including his elderly parents, which would mean that
his father would have to be financially compensated for the
(47:38):
loss of employment that relocation would cause. Had It went
on and on, and some of them were pretty absurd,
But one thing he wouldn't budge on was he wanted
a job. Specifically, he demanded that the FBI get him
a job as a Border Patrol agent. In the end,
(48:01):
he got almost everything he asked for. After the three
clansmen were convicted on the federal civil rights charge, the
FBI paid Gary row ten thousand dollars, the equivalent of
over one hundred thousand dollars to day. He was given
a new identity and a job. He didn't quite get
(48:21):
his dream job with the Border Patrol, but he worked
for some time.
Speaker 1 (48:25):
As a U. S Marshal.
Speaker 2 (48:28):
A decade later, when Wilkins and Thomas were finally out
of prison, they went on a national news program to
accuse Gary Rowe of being the real trigger man. They
both passed polygraph exams or whatever that's worth to you,
and additional witnesses came forward, including two policemen who testified
before a grand jury that Roe had bragged about being
(48:52):
the one to kill Liuzou. The prosecution was halted by
a federal injunction. He'd been granted immunity. It didn't matter
how many witnesses came forward and gave sworn testimony that
they knew for a fact that he was the killer,
that they saw him do it, that there was evidence
that he'd done it, that he admitted to them that
(49:13):
he'd done it, that he bragged about it.
Speaker 1 (49:15):
It didn't matter.
Speaker 2 (49:17):
The FBI had given him complete and total immunity in
exchange for the testimony he gave that put three other
men in prison for a murder that he at the
very least participated in. The gun he gave his FBI
handler the night of the murder was never examined as evidence,
and the FBI had every reason to cover up the
(49:37):
possibility that they'd paid thousands of dollars to a murderer.
It wouldn't be the first time they'd done it or
the last. So to distract from the involvement of a
federal informant with a documented history of violence, the FBI
dragged the.
Speaker 1 (49:57):
Victim through the mud.
Speaker 2 (49:59):
They played up her arest record and called her a
terrible mother. They drew up an FBI memo claiming that
an examination of the body revealed needle marks on her arms,
and then they intentionally leaked the fake memo to the press,
never mind that the actual autopsy report made no such
finding and there were no drugs in her system. Her
(50:19):
husband and children were harassed, a cross was burned in
their yard in Detroit the week of her funeral, and
they reported receiving obscene phone calls for months. If Hoover
had his way, Biola Luzo would not be memorialized as
a loving mother who felt moved to fight for civil rights.
She'd be shamed as a lunatic who abandoned her children,
(50:40):
shot up heroin, and had adulterous inner racial sex, and
then was quickly forgotten. The clan killed Biola Luzo, but
the FBI tried to kill her memory. And it's really
the same as it ever was. As I'm writing this,
I just saw New York Times headline from today, Monday,
(51:01):
January twelfth, twenty twenty six. FBI inquiry into Ice shooting
is examining victims possible ties to activist groups. They're investigating
the victim because they already know everything they need to
know about the killer.
Speaker 1 (51:19):
He's on their payroll. If you've been to a.
Speaker 2 (51:23):
Protest anytime in the last fifty years or so you've
heard this chant.
Speaker 7 (51:32):
Think cop, thinkin non im, thinkin hend then hard.
Speaker 2 (51:40):
I think plank no man. Cops and clan go hand
in hand. The earliest mention of that exact phrase being
used as a protest chant that I could find was
in a newspaper article from nineteen seventy six. But I
really only spend a few minutes looking, and I'm certain
(52:03):
it predates the late seventies. I'm sure it was something
Black Southerners said quietly to one another for a long
time before it was ever chanted at a protest.
Speaker 1 (52:15):
But what does it mean.
Speaker 2 (52:17):
I've heard it chanted at local cops, sheriff's deputies, state police,
National guardsmen. I've heard it at clan rallies and school
board meetings. I've shouted at myself with lips that burned
with the taste of pepper spray.
Speaker 1 (52:32):
But what does it mean?
Speaker 2 (52:35):
I never really gave it a lot of thought. It's
just one of those things that makes perfect sense to
me and doesn't merit further consideration. But it could mean
a lot of things.
Speaker 1 (52:46):
Maybe it's just an.
Speaker 2 (52:47):
Abbreviated way of expressing that law enforcement and organized white
supremacist groups that engage in extra judicial violence exist along
a spectrum of racial violence, meeting out that violence on
subjugated groups with varying degrees of legitimacy and public approval.
Or maybe it's meant to be commentary on the historical
(53:08):
evolution of modern policing and the way that it grew
out of Antebellum slave patrols, thus quite literally positioning cops
as the modern successor to groups of violent racist vigilantes.
I've been an actual clan rallies where it seems to
be a cry of frustration that the police are clearly
serving and protecting the interests of the actual clan at
(53:28):
the expense of the community, and in ways that result
in violence towards those who oppose the clan. Or maybe
it's even further removed from the words themselves. Maybe it's
a metonomy where cops refers to the state in general,
and clan is any sort of extra judicial enforcement mechanism
of the darker whims of that state. That's probably broad
(53:50):
enough to hold all possible meanings. Maybe it's all of
those things or none of them, but it doesn't actually
matter because it's literal. It's not a metaphor, it's not hyperbole.
It's not taking liberties. It's not a joke. It is
the literal, factual, historical truth. Cops and clan do indeed
(54:15):
go hand in hand. When Caesar cow said, James Waller,
William Evan Simpson, Sandra Nilie Smith, and Michael Nathan were
gunned down in the streets of Greensboro, North Carolina, there
was a police informant in the car with the klansmen
and the Nazis who shot them, And there was a
police informant at the clan meetings where their murders were planned.
When Yola Luza was shot in the head in Selma, Alabama,
(54:37):
there was an FBI informant in the car with the
clansmen who killed her. When the Birmingham police found out
the Freedom Riders were coming in nineteen sixty one, they
conspired with the clan to attack buses full of civil
rights activists. Bull Connor told the clan they had fifteen
minutes of free reign. A police captain told the clansmen
on the FBI's payroll, you can beat them, bomb them,
(54:59):
Maimon kill I don't give a shit.
Speaker 1 (55:01):
There will be absolutely no arrests.
Speaker 2 (55:04):
And the FBI knew, and the FBI didn't stop it.
They didn't warn anyone about what was coming. When the
mob of klansmen firebombed those buses and beat the fleeing
passengers with pipes and bats and chains, it was the
FBI informant himself leading the mob. When Michael Schwerner, James Cheney,
Andrew Goodman were killed in Nishaba County, Mississippi, it was
(55:25):
a lynching coordinated and planned by local police who discussed
the plan not at their police station, but at their
clan meetings. When the clansmen who murdered four little girls
in a church basement in Birmingham was finally prosecuted, he
went to his grave insisting that he'd only purchased that
dynamite and it was his friend, the FBI informant, who
placed it beneath the steps at the sixteenth Street Baptist Church,
(55:47):
killing Addie May Collin, Cynthia Wesley, Carroll Robertson, and Carroll
to niece McNair. He was never made to answer for
that accusation, but he was the same FBI informant who
later admitted to murdering a black man whose name he
couldn't even remember. When klansmen rioted in Myrtle Beach in
nineteen fifty, and one of their own was killed by
friendly fire as that crowd of masked races fired hundreds
(56:08):
of bullets into a black owned bar. They took their
fallen brother to the hospital, and when they stripped the
white robe off his dead body, he was still wearing
his policeman's uniform underneath. For decades, the federal government paid
klansmen to do their dirty work. They've used klansmen and
neo Nazis and right wing extremists of all stripes to
(56:28):
disrupt progressive movements. They've ignored credible intelligence about murders and
bombings they could have stopped, and they looked the other
way when their informants participated in violence against people they
thought posed a greater threat to the status quo. And
they've always thought liberty, equality, freedom, tolerance, diversity, and civil
(56:49):
rights were far more threatening than bombs in church basements
and lynchings on dark, abandoned highways.
Speaker 1 (56:57):
The comps the clan have.
Speaker 2 (56:59):
Always worked hand in hand to share the burden of
violently enforcing white supremacy, whether the klansman's FBI checks or
off the books, or the fascist foot soldier is getting
a W two from DHS. The violence is the same,
the goal is the same. They're doing what they've always done,
and so will we. I don't know exactly how long
(57:22):
this moral arc of the universe is, but never forget
you aren't the first to throw your shoulder into it,
determined to see it bent towards justice.
Speaker 1 (57:50):
Read Little Guys as a production of Cool Zone Media
and iHeartRadio. It's researched, written and recorded by me Molly Conger.
Our executive producers are Sophie Lichterman and Robert Evans. The
show is at a by the wildly talented Rory Gagan.
The theme music was composed by Brad Dickert.
Speaker 2 (58:04):
You can email me at Weird Little Guys podcast at
gmail dot com. I will definitely read it, but I
probably won't answer.
Speaker 1 (58:09):
It's nothing personal.
Speaker 2 (58:11):
You can exchange conspiracy theories about the show with other
listeners on the Weird Little Guys Subreddy. Just don't post
anything that's going to make you one of my Weird
Little Guys.
Host
Molly Conger
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