SOMETHING TO SEE

Aim above morality. Be not simply good, be good for something. — Henry David Thoreau

I visited the Brown v. Board of Education National Historic Site in Topeka recently. It's the former black-only elementary school that Linda Brown had to attend in the 1950s instead of the white school that was much nearer to her home. The restored school is now a national museum devoted to the struggle to end segregation.

While rummaging around the gift shop I opened a deck of "playing cards" showing the milestones of the civil rights movement, and I came upon something I had never seen before, which was this woman's face:



Do you know who she is? Does her name, Viola Liuzzo, ring a bell?

It didn't for me. I flipped over the card and read that she was a 39-year-old mother of five and a student of nursing who was married to a tough-guy Teamster. When she heard about the civil rights movement in the South, she dropped everything and drove by herself to Alabama in March 1965. She used her car to help protesters on the Voting Rights March from Selma to Montgomery — until a car full of Klansmen, including an FBI agent, pulled up beside her, fired two bullets into her head and left her to die on the side of the road.

After her murder, the FBI ran a smear campaign against her, accusing her of going to the South to do drugs, be a communist and sleep with black men. The jury acquitted the men of her murder, and the Klan threw a big party for them.

It's one of the most shameful things the U.S. government has ever done — to one of the best people this country has ever produced.

I didn't learn about her in my high school civics class or history or anywhere else. Do you think anyone is learning about her today?

After I got home from the museum I looked her up on the Internet and found that an award-winning documentary, "Home of the Brave," had been made about her and what became of her children after her murder. I ordered it from Netflix. In the film, one of her daughters makes a very moving journey back to Alabama, and the others are seen coping all these decades later with the loss of their mother.

I remember in high school learning about the American Transcendentalists and the anecdote where Henry David Thoreau was in jail for not paying taxes to support what he considered an unjust and inhumane war. His friend Ralph Waldo Emerson came to visit his cell and said, "What are you doing in there?" To which Thoreau replied, "What are you doing out there?"

When Viola Liuzzo's death became national news, not just the federal government, but large segments of the public, wondered "What was she doing down there?" A white woman. A mother. A wife. This documentary makes the reply that she never had the chance to: "What were you doing up there?"