Viola Liuzzo Mourned

Mar. 26, 1965 - “There were 25,000 people down there, and she had to be the one. She had to be the one. My God, it’s unbelievable.”

Those were the anguished words of Anthony Liuzzo (left), 51, minutes after he learned his wife, Viola, 39, had been shot to death while driving between Selma and Montgomery, Ala., after yesterday’s civil rights demonstration in Montgomery.

Liuzzo, a husky Teamsters’ official, wept and said:“The dirty rats, the dirty rats. What kind of people are living down there? What kind of people can they be?”

He described his wife, a mother of five, as a “champion of the people. She was the biggest-hearted woman you ever saw in your life.”Mrs. Liuzzo had gone to Selma last week.

“I tried to discourage her,” Liuzzo said. “But she told me four or five of her friends were going down there, and I couldn’t stop her. They took off.”

Liuzzo talked to newsmen in his home in a pleasant neighborhood in northwest Detroit. It was after midnight, but all the lights were on. There were children crying:“They killed mom. They killed mom.”“Why couldn’t she die from being old?” cried Sally, 6.

“I thought it was a nightmare,” said Thomas, 13.

Liuzzo recalled yelling in shock: “Penny, Penny, they shot mommy!” Penny, 18, is the oldest daughter.

Liuzzo told how he found out about his wife’s death.

“At 12:05 a.m., my phone rang,” he said. “It was a call from Montgomery. A man told me: ‘Your wife has been shot.’

“I asked him: ‘Is it serious?’

“He said: ‘No, it’s critical.’

“And then he said: ‘Just a moment please’ and left the phone. He came back to the phone and said, ‘She’s dead.’”

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