Civil Rights Events

SCOPE Project

Getting Started

The Selma Voting Rights Campaign and March to Montgomery are victorious — a voting rights bill has been introduced in Congress and with LBJ's backing it is certain to eventually pass. But SCLC as an organization is in disarray. Dr. King is physically and emotionally exhausted, and the savage murder of Viola Liuzzo, mother of five, hits him hard. And like soldiers after a long, hard-won battle, SCLC's small field staff in the Alabama Black Belt is worn down from three months of intense and brutal action.

On the plus side, the organization is flush with money and as Spring evolves towards Summer contributions remain steady. With this new influx of cash, the field staff of a few dozen is now swelling towards 200. Half of SCLC's income is personally raised by Dr. King through his speaking engagements and appeals in the North. Most of the rest comes in the form of modest mail-in contributions averaging around $10 (equal to $70 in 2012) — primarily from New York City and other urban areas of the Northeast, the Chicago area, Southern California, and the San Francisco Bay region. But this means that SCLC is becoming financially dependent on northern whites rather than its original financial base of southern Black churches.

A week after the march ends in Montgomery, SCLC leaders meet in Baltimore to plan what the organization should do next. There is dissension, disagreement, and fierce rivalry among the Executive Staff directly below King. Three quite different strategies are proposed and argued:

Undertaking a new initiative in a northern urban ghetto.

Extending and expanding the Alabama campaign with direct action and an economic boycott.

A massive, multi-state voter registration effort.

There is no consensus. Unable to agree on a single strategic direction, all proposals are approved in one form or another even though everyone knows they don't have the necessary staff or funds for three major initiatives (Now 1).

One unintended result of the Selma victory is that Black communities in the North are now intensifying their calls (demands, in some cases) that Dr. King and SCLC apply their magic touch to the festering misery of urban ghettos. King, himself, had previously said, "I realize I must more and more extend my work beyond the borders of the South, and become involved to a much greater extent with the problems of the urban North." At the Baltimore meeting, Andrew Young proposes that SCLC answer those calls.

But many SCLC leaders oppose any move North. SCLC's southern affiliates all face urgent local problems with scant resources. They desperately need help and support from Atlanta. Some board members argue that SCLC has no base of churches or affiliates in the North, little experience with issues of defacto rather than dejure segregation, and no strategy for addressing pervasive covert discrimination or intractable urban poverty. Many question how — and whether — nonviolent strategies and tactics can be applied in the North, and what support they will find among the bitterly alienated urban poor (Go 1).

…

James Bevel, architect and field commander of the Birmingham and Selma campaigns, passionately argues for continuing and intensifying the freedom struggle in Alabama with both an economic boycott of the state and a return to the original Alabama Project concept of mass direct action and civil-disobedience in Montgomery. "We want the federal government to come in here, register Negroes, and throw out the present government as un-Constitutional," and then hold new elections in which everyone over the age of 21 is allowed to vote.

Dr. King has already announced the boycott as necessary to halt Alabama's "reign of terror," and at the Baltimore meeting he lays out a strategy of three successive stages. First, applying pressure on Washington to enforce the laws denying federal funds to programs practicing discrimination while simultaneously issuing a call for northern corporations to halt new investments in the state. Second, mobilize unions, businesses, churches and other organizations to withdraw their investments from Alabama. Third, organize a massive consumer boycott of Alabama products.

Public opposition to the boycott is immediate and intense. The Johnson administration condemns the idea. The New York Times calls it "wrong in principle ... and unworkable in practice." Sympathetic politicians like Governors "Pat" Brown of California and Mark Hatfield of Oregon reject it. Labor unions who had supported SCLC in the past come out against the boycott. …

There are also practical problems. Business and consumer boycotts are difficult at best and require a massive commitment of organizational time and resources. Corporations are rarely amenable to altering their investment strategies to meet social concerns ….

… Ultimately, the Alabama boycott proves unworkable and withers away. By Summer it has been effectively dropped ….

The direct action component of Bevel's campaign also encounters problems. … Many of those arrested had been bailed out on property bonds, but people willing to put up their homes and farms for bail have already done so, and property that was used to bail someone out in February cannot be used for someone else in May. Without assurances that SCLC will bail them out of jail, it will be difficult to mobilize thousands of protesters to deliberately court arrest by engaging in mass civil-disobedience. …

SCLC's local affiliate is the Montgomery Improvement Association and its leaders — mostly ministers and businessmen — have little enthusiasm for Bevel's radical plans. After the March to Montgomery, with finals and term papers now on the horizon, a form of protest-fatigue sets in among the students who had earlier filled the jails. … The direct action campaign sputters out and is quietly shelved (Alabama 1-3).

Hosea Williams, leader of the powerful Savannah Movement and the "Bloody Sunday" march over the Edmund Pettus Bridge, argues for a Summer Community Organization & Political Education (SCOPE) project focused on voter registration. He calls for recruiting 2,000 volunteers — mostly northerners, mostly white, mostly college students — to register voters in 120 southern counties across six states. He and Bevel are SCLC's main direct action leaders. They are also bitter personal rivals. At the Baltimore meeting, SCOPE and the Alabama campaign are pitted against each other.

In some respects, the SCOPE proposal is similar to SNCC/COFO's Mississippi Summer Project of the previous year, but SCOPE advocates assume there will be one huge difference. Despite the courage and dedication of Freedom Summer's local and outside activists, only a few new voters had been added to the rolls. But now Vice-President Hubert Humphrey (who presides over the Senate) has assured Movement leaders that the filibuster will be broken and the Voting Rights Act passed before the end of June. This means that Afro-Americans in the Deep South will be able to register in large numbers. A massive registration effort under the new law could actually begin to shift the balance of political power in the southern Black Belt.

Hosea Williams is noted for his defiant courage, passionate oratory, direct action creativity, and hair-trigger temper, but not so much for administration. Some SCOPE opponents question his ability to fund and coordinate thousands of volunteers and staff across multiple states. For the 1964 Freedom Summer, SNCC/COFO had five and a half months to plan, recruit, train, and prepare projects for 1,000 volunteers working roughly 40 counties in a single state under guidance of a field staff that had been organizing in Mississippi for almost three years. The initial SCOPE proposal calls for twice as many volunteers spread over six states in 120 counties many of which have had no organizers preparing the way at all. And SCOPE must come together in two and a half months. It's bold, it's ambitious, and the Baltimore meeting adopts it as SCLC's major focus for the coming months (Summer 1-2).

Meanwhile, tension between SCLC and SNCC continues to fester. Many SNCC workers oppose the entire concept of bringing white volunteers to work in Black communities, and they want nothing to do with SCLC. "It will be the same shit as Selma, the SCLC executives are gone and have left the flunkies — mainly white northern students left there," says Alabama project director Silas Norman. In the opinion of Annie Pearl Avery, a SNCC field secretary working in rural Hale County, "SCLC will come in after SNCC does the ground work. All SCLC has is King and Reverends."

But others in SNCC are coming around to a different view. In mid-April, the SNCC Executive Committee meets in Holly Springs MS. Says former SNCC Chairman Marion Barry, "What we have to do is to try to radicalize King. Those of us who have been around for awhile can see the great change in King, and there are members of SCLC who are pushing for the same thing." He urges SNCC to work with SCOPE. A week later Harry Belafonte mediates a sit-down in Atlanta between leaders of SNCC and SCLC. Coming out of that meeting, Stokely Carmichael reports: "In terms of overall goals, SCLC is very radical. King said economic problems were the real issue of the country, but didn't know how to get to them. I think the cats are honest." He argues that SNCC should cooperate with SCOPE and use King's mass appeal, pointing out that SCLC has access to churches in places like Hale County that SNCC does not. "The students coming down with SCOPE will have to come to the SNCC workers. The same holds true for King. ... The people will follow King, but he'll still have to go through the SNCC workers."

At the end of April, a joint statement is issued by Dr. King and SNCC Chairman John Lewis stating that SCLC and SNCC will work together on a program of voter education and political organization across six Southern states. As a practical matter, there are significant numbers of SNCC staff in only two of the states where SCOPE plans projects — Alabama and Southwest Georgia. In some areas over the summer there is tension, distrust, and occasional open hostility between SCLC/SCOPE and SNCC, in others they work separately but without overt rancor, and in some counties there is close cooperation — in a few instances so close that they form what is, in effect, a joint project. (Meanwhile, over the summer of 1965, SNCC projects continue in Mississippi & Arkansas and CORE organizes its own summer project for Louisiana.) (SCLC/SCOPE 1-2).

Recruitment gets underway in April. Learning from the Freedom Summer experience, emphasis is placed on creating campus-based SCOPE chapters with volunteers who already know each other, will work together in an assigned county, and be supported by their college community. The goal is to create an ongoing connection between that campus and the Freedom Movement in the "adopted" county. …

…

Many northern colleges have active Friends of SNCC and CORE chapters and often a cadre of Freedom Summer veterans. Within SNCC there had been proposals and discussion of SNCC mounting a major summer project for 1965, but that does not occur. At some colleges, the SNCC chapters cooperate with and support the SCOPE recruiters, at others less so. … at some of the most politically-aware campuses, committed activists are beginning to turn their attention away from civil rights towards Vietnam. Above all, time is short — too short for SCOPE to recruit the number of northern volunteers originally hoped for. As April turns into May, expectations are scaled back from 2,000 in 120 counties to 500 or so working in roughly 80 counties.

Meetings are held with local Black community leaders from some, though not all, of the counties where there will be SCOPE projects. It is these local leaders who will direct SCOPE activities, arrange meals and housing for the northern volunteers, and provide somewhere for the project to meet and work. They are also responsible for recruiting the team of local volunteers — primarily Black high school and college students — who will partner with the northerners in canvassing and organizing (SCOPE 1-3).

Maria Gitin (known at that time as Joyce Brians) was one of the white college students recruited to work as a SCOPE project volunteer. She wrote about her experiences in her unpublished book 1965 This Bright Light of Ours: a Memoir and Stories of the Wilcox County Freedom Fight.

In 1965, I joined hundreds of other college students in a voter education and registration drive aimed at supporting disenfranchised African Americans in poor rural counties across the Deep South in their long struggle to register to vote. …

On March 8th I saw Dr Martin Luther King Jr. for the first time. He pointed his finger directly at me and what I heard him say was, "We need you white northern students to come down this summer and join our nonviolent struggle, become part of The Movement and help our people fight for our rights."

In an era when there were only three channels, the images on the small black and white TV at my friend Jeff Freed's parents' house were grainy, but unforgettable. Jeff kept trying to explain the political significance, but I could only watch in horror as masses of white Alabama state troopers and Selma policemen attacked peaceful primarily black marchers from the safety of their horses. Tear gas canisters were launched from huge guns. Troopers beat hundreds of people including young children as they scrambled for safety, just because they had assembled to march to Montgomery for voting rights. …

I headed to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) office on campus [San Francisco State College] because I had heard that their effective Mississippi Freedom Summer got the 1964 Civil Rights Act passed. There I was told I could only belong to Friends of SNCC, the white support group, so I joined that and began to get some instruction in the role of whites in the Freedom Movement. …

While I was trying to figure out what I could do specifically to respond to Dr. King's call for action, down in Atlanta SCLC's Rev. Hosea Williams and SNCC Chairman John Lewis, an SCLC board member, were planning an ambitious voter education and political organization program named the Summer Community Organizing and Political Education (SCOPE) Project, spearheaded by SCLC.

During the spring, the 1965 Voting Rights Act that was supposed to fix the remaining voting exclusion loopholes left in the 1964 Civil Rights Act was making its way through Congress. The SCOPE project was timed to coincide with what SCLC strategists had good reason to believe would be the first summer that the new Voting Rights Act (1965 VRA) would be available as a tool. The 1965 VRA was expected to become law before the project began in June.

…

… Wilcox County, where I was assigned, was selected as one of the Alabama counties for the SCLC-SCOPE voting rights campaign and for continued filing in federal courts.

…

SCOPE training materials said that this project planned to meet three objectives: local recruitment of potential elected officials from the black community, voter registration, and political education. SCOPE activities were expected to build on grass-roots community organizations that had been carrying the burden for a long time, bringing in fresh student "troops" who would hopefully return summer after summer to volunteer in school integration efforts, the new federal War on Poverty initiative and to support the education and election of new African American leaders.

The project resulted in over 1,200 SCOPE workers, including 650 college students from across the nation; 150 SCLC staff members, mostly scarcely paid field workers ($5 a week was a typical stipend), and 400 local volunteers, working in 6 southern states to organize, educate and assist African Americans in registering to vote. As soon as I heard about the project from SNCC and got more information at the Ec House, I signed up.

In order to join the project, I had to raise $200 for my travel and living expenses, a huge sum of money for me in those days, get my parent's permission, and attend intensive briefing sessions in Berkeley every Saturday for a month. …

Since I was under 21, I had to convince my father to sign an affidavit swearing that he wouldn't sue SCLC if I were injured or killed, which I did by telling him that I would forge his signature if he would not sign. My parents knew that they had already lost what little control they had over me by not supporting me financially through college because I disobeyed their dictum that their children must live at home and attend a local community college to gain their financial support.

…

The Saturday SCOPE briefings emphasized history and nonviolent theory along with updates on current events in the southern Civil Rights Movement. The instruction we received from professors, ministers and activists was based in a genuine belief in strict nonviolence and the benefits of integration. We were informed that SCOPE was the brainchild of brilliant civil rights strategist Rev. Hosea Williams, an SCLC Program Director who they told us organized the Selma to Montgomery marches.

…

SNCC was born with these stated ideals, however a rapidly emerging philosophy of self-determination and black liberation was permeating the organization as I already understood from being denied membership in the "real" SNCC on campus. SCLC leaders were still staunchly pro-integration and believed that we mostly white SCOPE student volunteers would bring media, money and perhaps safety although the increasing violence towards whites and blacks working together in The South did not auger well for that outcome. Some SNCC leaders anticipated that we would bring more violence because white racists go crazy when they see white women with black men. They also anticipated that we would bring superior attitudes that disrespected their sacrifices and achievements. Dr. King believed strongly that integration of all races and faiths would result in equal justice and opportunity for all. I took careful notes and wondered what it would be like in the trenches; how things would play out in whichever county I was assigned.

…

I eagerly looked forward to each of the briefing sessions during which they tried to teach us the entire history of segregation, the status of past and pending civil rights legislation, how The Movement worked, how to control our own unconscious bias, what to expect and how to behave when we went South. Much of it was a blur, but I remember feeling that it was a great turning point for me and for the United States. The leaders made it very clear that we were to be white allies to an entirely black led organization, which was just fine with me.

The person who stands out most clearly from the briefing sessions is Rev. Cecil Williams, the dynamic young African American preacher from [San Francisco’s] Glide Memorial Methodist Church who exhorted us to make the South safer for black voter registration with our young, white, eminently newsworthy, federally- protectable bodies. One fact that stood out in my mind was that we could be killed but, worse, girls could, had been and probably would be raped by jail guards and Ku Klux Klan members.

We reviewed footage of the beatings and tear gas canisters fired at marchers during Bloody Sunday in which Rev Williams himself had been injured. We listened to stories from people who had been on the big successful Montgomery to Selma march and heard about the recent murders of Jimmy Lee Jackson, Viola Luizzo and Rev. James Reeb in Alabama as well as the previous summer of 1964 assassinations of James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman while they were working with SNCC to establish Freedom Schools in Neshoba County, Mississippi. The message I got was that this was risky business; the stakes were high but the cry for justice was more important than any of our lives (Gitin 1-14).

Works cited:

“Alabama Boycott & Montgomery Direct Action?” Summer Community Organization & Political Education Project (SCOPE). Civil Rights Movement History. 1965. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/tim65b.htm#1965scope

Gitin, Maria. “SCLC/SCOPE Project.” Veterans of the Civil Rights Movement. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/info/scope1.htm

“Go North?” Summer Community Organization & Political Education Project (SCOPE). Civil Rights Movement History. 1965. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/tim65b.htm#1965scope

“Now what?” Summer Community Organization & Political Education Project (SCOPE). Civil Rights Movement History. 1965. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/tim65b.htm#1965scope

“SCLC/SCOPE and SNCC.” Summer Community Organization & Political Education Project (SCOPE). Civil Rights Movement History. 1965. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/tim65b.htm#1965scope

“SCOPE Recruitment and Training.” Summer Community Organization & Political Education Project (SCOPE). Civil Rights Movement History. 1965. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/tim65b.htm#1965scope

“Summer Community Organization & Political Education (SCOPE)?” Summer Community Organization & Political Education Project (SCOPE). Civil Rights Movement History. 1965. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/tim65b.htm#1965scope

Civil Rights Events

Voting Rights Act 1965

 

In 1870 the 15th Amendment was ratified, which provided specifically that the right to vote shall not be denied or abridged on the basis of race, color or previous condition of servitude. This superseded state laws that had directly prohibited black voting. Congress then enacted the Enforcement Act of 1870, which contained criminal penalties for interference with the right to vote, and the Force Act of 1871, which provided for federal election oversight.

As a result, in the former Confederate States, where new black citizens in some cases comprised outright or near majorities of the eligible voting population, hundreds of thousands -- perhaps one million -- recently-freed slaves registered to vote. Black candidates began for the first time to be elected to state, local and federal offices and to play a meaningful role in their governments.

The extension of the franchise to black citizens was strongly resisted. Among others, the Ku Klux Klan, the Knights of the White Camellia, and other terrorist organizations attempted to prevent the 15th Amendment from being enforced by violence and intimidation. (Before 1-2) The withdrawal of federal troops from former Confederate states following the Hayes-Tilden Compromise of 1877 allowed state legislatures to pass discriminatory voting laws that effected disenfranchisement of virtually every black citizen.

Such disfranchising laws included poll taxes, literacy tests, vouchers of "good character," and disqualification for "crimes of moral turpitude." These laws were "color-blind" on their face, but were designed to exclude black citizens disproportionately by allowing white election officials to apply the procedures selectively (Before 3)

Civil rights events in the 1950s and early 1960s eventually galvanized the nation. Congress passed Civil Rights Acts in 1957, 1960, and 1964. None were strong enough to prevent voting discrimination by local officials.

On March 7, 1965, peaceful voting rights protesters in Selma, Alabama were violently attacked by Alabama state police. News cameras filmed the violence in what became known as “Bloody Sunday.” Many Americans and members of Congress began to wonder if existing civil rights laws would ever be properly enforced by the local authorities. The question before Congress was whether the federal government should guarantee the right to vote by assuming the power to register voters. Since qualifications for voting were traditionally set by state and local officials, federal voting rights protection represented a significant change in the constitutional balance of power between the states and the federal government (Congress 1).

Democrats have a 2-1 majority in the Senate, but the southern wing of the party — the "Dixiecrats" — are bitterly opposed to any legislation that will increase the number of Black voters. The inevitable southern filibuster cannot be overcome without substantial Republican support. [Attorney General] Katzenbach negotiates with Senate minority leader Everett Dirksen (R-IL). Then he meets with Senate majority leader Mike Mansfield (D-MT). Soon Katzenbach, Justice Department lawyers, Republican and Democrat Senate leaders, Senate staff, and civil rights leaders are all involved in negotiating a bipartisan voting bill that can effectively end racial voting barriers yet still gain enough Republican support to defeat a southern filibuster.

Though the protests have focused on Black voting rights, Freedom Movement leaders insist that the bill address all forms of vote-related racial bias. Latinos trying to register or vote in Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, Arizona and parts of California have long faced discriminatory procedures, intimidation, and economic retaliation; as have Native Americans throughout the West, portions of the Northeast, and Alaska.

Feeling the heat both domestically and internationally, LBJ pushes them to move fast, the voting rights issue is diverting attention from his "Great Society" legislation and undermining his Vietnam strategy. He now wants a bill and he wants it now. Katzenbach is ordered to come up with something the President can present to Congress on the weekend of March 13-14, just days away. By Friday the 12th, the negotiators have agreed that the bill must include some provision for suspending the so-called "literacy tests" and also federal authority to register voters in counties that continue to systematically deny voting rights. But there is no agreement on the formulas or thresholds that would trigger such "drastic" action. …

In the South, Blacks who attempt to exercise their rights as citizens face terrorism by white racists. …

A general clause outlawing threats and intimidation is added to the draft bill. But "Law and order" Republicans (and Democrats) adamantly oppose any kind of specific restriction on police actions, or any sort of oversight of local police behavior on the part of Washington. Movement activists recall the criticisms that John Lewis made of the Civil Rights Act of 1964: "... there's nothing to protect the young children and old women who must face police dogs and fire hoses in the South while they engage in peaceful demonstration. In its present form this bill will not protect the citizens of Danville, Virginia, who must live in constant fear of a police state. It will not protect the hundreds and thousands of people that have been arrested on trumped charges." Their pleas for police-specific remedies are ignored.

Economic retaliation — often organized by the local White Citizens Council — is another method of suppressing voting rights. … But pro-business Republicans and Democrats oppose legislation that might grant any arm of government authority to "intrude" on the "business decisions" of private enterprise or to investigate or regulate the motivations behind individual business actions. A bill that contains any such restrictions on "free enterprise" cannot possibly pass. Economic barriers to voting are not included in the draft bill.

With specific restrictions on police conduct and economic retaliation off the table, poll taxes emerge as the main bone of contention. …

In 1964, the 24th Amendment outlawed poll taxes in elections for federal offices, but all southern states except Maryland still retain poll taxes for state and local elections. (Vermont is the only non-southern state with a poll tax.) Senator Ted Kennedy proposes an amendment to eliminate poll taxes in all elections and that is added to the draft. Conservatives object. In their view, a state's right to levy taxes must be held sacrosanct from federal "meddling." …

In a televised address to the nation on March 15th, President Johnson presents the proposed Voting Rights Act (VRA) to a joint session of Congress. Many southern congressmen boycott the session. Johnson condemns the denial of fundamental rights based on race, and the nation's failure of to live up to the promise of its creed. "There is no Negro problem, there is only an American problem, and we are met here tonight as Americans ... to solve that problem. ... it is not just Negroes, but really it's all of us who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And—we—shall—overcome."

Dirksen and Mansfield jointly submit the Voting Rights Act to the Senate on March 18. It goes to the Judiciary Committee for consideration, with an April 9 deadline. Civil Rights leaders and Congressional liberals want a stronger bill, conservatives want a weaker one. Shortly before midnight on April 9, the Judiciary Committee sends the bill to the full Senate. In some respects, the intense lobbying of liberals has made it stronger than the original Dirksen-Mansfield draft — but it's still weaker than what Freedom Movement leaders and activists had hoped for.

Senate debate on the VRA begins on April 22. The southern Dixiecrats argue that it's an unconstitutional intrusion on the right of states to impose their own voting procedures and requirements. Their filibuster takes the form of a flood of weakening amendments, each of which have to be debated and voted on separately. The battle continues for weeks. The filibuster can only be broken by passing a cloture motion which requires at least 20 Republican votes to pass. But conservative Republicans oppose expansion of federal authority into areas traditionally reserved to the states. To win over Republicans, the poll tax ban is watered down so that it only applies to six states: Virginia, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. The states of Florida, North Carolina, Arkansas, Tennessee, Kentucky and Texas are exempted. (In 1972, Texas is added back in during the Nixon administration.) The cloture vote takes place on May 25th. It passes 70-30.

The next day the Senate passes the full bill by a vote of 77-19.

The House then becomes the focus, and again poll taxes emerge as the critical issue. Liberals from districts with large numbers of Black and Jewish voters don't want to be seen as laggards on civil rights, so they fight for a total ban on all poll taxes — everywhere. …

By a vote of 333-85 on July 9, the House passes a Voting Rights Act containing a complete ban on all poll taxes. Because the Senate and House versions of the bill don't match, it's sent to a conference committee to resolve the differences. The House negotiators refuse to budge — repeal all poll taxes now! The Senate negotiators refuse to budge — the Senate won't accept a bill with a total ban. Deadlock.

Impatient at the delay, President Johnson forges a compromise and rams it through. Accept the Senate's poll tax language, but add a "declaration" that poll taxes abridge the right to vote, a directive ordering the Attorney General to immediately move against poll taxes in federal court, and instructions that the courts are to expedite hearing the cases at "the earliest practical dates." He asks Dr. King to support the compromise. With hundreds of SCLC summer volunteers in six southern states waiting for the Act to become law, King assures the House negotiators that the new language is acceptable. They come to agreement on July 28. The final bill passes the House 328-74 on August 3rd, it passes the Senate 72-18 on August 4, and is signed into law on August 6th with King, Rosa Parks, Bayard Rustin, and other civil rights leaders in attendance.

The Justice Department immediately files suit against poll taxes in four states. Eight months later, the Supreme Court rules in Harper v Virginia Board of Elections that poll taxes in state and local elections are unconstitutional (Passage 5-12).

“This law covers many pages,” Johnson said before signing the bill, “but the heart of the act is plain. Wherever, by clear and objective standards, States and counties are using regulations, or laws, or tests to deny the right to vote, then they will be struck down” (Voting Rights – Stanford 2).

Section 2, which closely followed the language of the 15th amendment, applied a nationwide prohibition of the denial or abridgment of the right to vote on account of race or color.

Section 5 of the act required covered jurisdictions to obtain "preclearance" from either the District Court for the District of Columbia or the U.S. Attorney General for any new voting practices and procedures (Voting 1965 1-2). The Justice Department could now send examiners to any state or county where a literacy test or a similar deterrent to black registration had been in effect as of the 1964 presidential election and where turnout or registration for that election had fallen below 50% of the voting age population (Cobb 1-2).

Stated more succinctly, the legislation outlawed literacy tests and provided for the appointment of Federal examiners (with the power to register qualified citizens to vote) in certain jurisdictions with a history of voting discrimination. In addition, these jurisdictions could not change voting practices or procedures without "preclearance" from either the U.S. Attorney General or the District Court for Washington, DC. This act shifted the power to register voters from state and local officials to the federal government (Congress 2).

Initial implementation of the VRA falls far short of Freedom Movement hopes. Many county registrars continue to use now-illegal schemes and procedures to deny Black voting rights. Klan terrorism and Citizens Council economic retaliation also continue in many areas. Federal enforcement of the Act's criminal provisions is weak and often half-hearted. Black voters and civil rights workers see little immediate change (Passage 13).

Nevertheless, it was only eight days after President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act on Aug. 6 of 1965 that federal voting examiners speedily dispatched to Selma, Ala., proceeded in a single day to register 381 new black voters, more than had managed to register in Dallas County over the last 65 years. Local Sheriff Jim Clark’s hair-trigger resort to physical violence against would-be black registrants had left little doubt of his determination that such a day would never come for his town. Yet, ironically, he had actually helped to assure that it did, when, back in March of that year, he led the charge in the savage “Bloody Sunday” beating and maiming of voting-rights marchers, an event that had sparked national outrage and spurred demands for stronger federal intervention. By November, the county had 8,000 new black voters—and, not coincidentally, after the next May’s primary elections it would have a new sheriff as well, leaving Jim Clark to try his hand at selling mobile homes (Cobb 1).

Initially, the voting rights act’s provisions applied to every Deep South state except Florida, plus Virginia and some 40 counties in North Carolina. And they worked, nowhere more obviously than in Mississippi, where the percentage of eligible black voters registered ballooned from 7% in 1964 to 67% just five years later (Cobb 2).

By the end of 1965, a quarter of a million new black voters had been registered [nationally], one-third by Federal examiners. By the end of 1966, only 4 out of the 13 southern states had fewer than 50 percent of African Americans registered to vote (Voting 1965 4).

As the number of African American voters increased, so did the number of African American elected officials. In the mid-1960s there were about 70 African American elected officials in the South, but by the turn of the 21st century there were some 5,000, and the number of African American members of the U.S. Congress had increased from 6 to about 40 (Voting Rights – Encyclo. 5).

Because the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was the most significant statutory change in the relationship between the Federal and state governments in the area of voting since the Reconstruction period following the Civil War, it was immediately challenged in the courts. Between 1965 and 1969, the Supreme Court issued several key decisions upholding the constitutionality of Section 5 and affirming the broad range of voting practices for which preclearance was required (Voting 1965 3-4).

Only 12 years ago, in 2006, a unanimous Senate and a nearly unanimous House of Representatives re-authorized Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, the crucial provision that prevented jurisdictions with a history of discriminatory voting practices from implementing any changes in voting without federal preclearance.

Nevertheless, a scant seven years later, a deeply divided Supreme Court handed down a decision that, in the words of Congressman John Lewis, "put a dagger in the heart of the Voting Rights Act of 1965." Shelby County v. Holder overturned Section 5. This left Section 2 as the Voting Rights Act's sole remaining prohibition of racial discrimination in voting. But since January 20, 2017, the DOJ has not filed a single suit under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act (Clarke and Rosenberg 3-4).

As a result of that case [Shelby County v. Holder] and a prior one legalizing so-called “Voter ID” laws, along with other anti-voter moves such as shutting polling places in African-American areas, voter intimidation by so-called Republican “observers,” curtailed balloting hours and high-cost registration requirements, lawmakers may have to pass a Voting Rights Act all over again (Gruenberg 2-3).

Works cited:

“Before the Voting Rights Act.” The United States Department of Justice. Web. https://www.justice.gov/crt/introduction-federal-voting-rights-laws

Clarke, Kristen and Rosenberg, Ezra. “Trump Administration Has Voting Rights Act on Life Support.” CNN. August 6, 2018. Web. https://www.cnn.com/2018/08/06/opinions/voting-rights-act-anniversary-long-way-to-go-clarke-rosenberg-opinion/index.html

Cobb, James C. “The Voting Rights Act at 50: How It Changed the World.” Time, August 6, 2015. Web. http://time.com/3985479/voting-rights-act-1965-results/

“Congress and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.” The Center for Legislative Archives. Web. https://www.archives.gov/legislative/features/voting-rights-1965

Gruenberg, Mark. “Voting Rights Act of 1965 May Have to Be Passed Again.” People’s World. Web. https://www.peoplesworld.org/article/voting-rights-act-of-1965-may-have-to-be-passed-again/

“Passage of the Voting Rights Act (Mar-Aug).” Civil Rights Movement History: 1965. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/tim65b.htm#1965vra65

“Voting Rights Act of 1965.” Stanford: The Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute. Web. https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/voting-rights-act-1965

“Voting Rights Act (1965).” Our Documents. Web. https://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=true&doc=100

“The Voting Rights Act.” Encyclopedia Britannica. Web. https://www.britannica.com/event/Voting-Rights-Act



Civil Rights Events

March to Montgomery

Murder of Viola Liuzzo

 

It's late afternoon when the marchers begin to disperse after the freedom rally at the Alabama Capitol. From the moment they leave Brown Chapel in Selma to the end of the program in Montgomery, the U.S. Army and federal law enforcement agencies keep everyone safe — no one has been seriously injured. But now the elaborate protection system begins to wind down just as tens of thousands of people head home. Unfamiliar with Montgomery streets, thousands of northern supporters, who came directly to the city, need help finding the homes and churches where their luggage is waiting and then transportation to airports and bus depots. Since passage of the Civil Rights Act, Black-owned taxis are now legally permitted to carry white passengers, but they are overwhelmed and white taxis want nothing to do with "agitators" and "race-mixers." Thousands of Blacks need to return to Selma, and thousands more to Wilcox, Perry, and other Alabama counties and communities. What little money SCLC has left is used to charter some buses, but most people have to be ferried back along US 80 in hastily organized carpools (Murder 1).

In the winter of 1965, Viola Liuzzo had two children by a previous marriage and three with her husband Anthony, an official with Teamsters local 247 in Detroit. Born in Pennsylvania, she had been raised in blinding poverty, mostly in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

Viola was an observant girl, however, and one of the things she noticed was that however tough life was for her family, blacks in Chattanooga seemed to have it worse. She had a big heart, her kids recall to this day, and her everyday activism ranged from taking in stray cats and dogs to going back to school at Wayne State University to get a degree in sociology. She also contributed to social causes championed by her congregation, the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Detroit.

That February and March, she had been watching television coverage from Alabama, as Selma turned increasingly violent. In February, state troopers clubbed and fatally shot Jimmie Lee Jackson. In early March, James Reeb, a Unitarian minister from Boston was beaten to death.

Liuzzo had watched television as the March 7 demonstration turned into a violent attack on the marchers, an event dubbed “Bloody Sunday.” That month, she attended a sympathy rally in support of the Selma protesters, and when some Wayne State study partners told her they were planning to go to Alabama, Liuzzo decided to join them. She volunteered to take her own car, a 1963 Oldsmobile, which proved fateful. She left Detroit on March 16, telling her husband she hoped he’d understand (Cannon 1-2).

Driving alone in her big Oldsmobile, it takes her three days to reach Selma where she volunteers with different work teams including the transportation committee (Murder 2).

Liuzzo joined thousands of fellow protestors in the first leg of the historic Selma to Montgomery march on March 21. However, state officials only allowed 300 marchers to continue the journey along the section of Highway 80 known as "Big Swamp" where the road narrowed from four to two lanes, and Liuzzo was not among the chosen group. Instead, she served at the Brown's Chapel hospitality desk in Selma until she rejoined the selected group on March 24 at City of St. Jude just inside the Montgomery city limits, where she provided first aid to many of the marchers. While waiting for the final leg of the march to start on the morning of March 25, Liuzzo had a premonition that somebody was going to be killed that day; she thought it might even be Alabama Governor George Wallace. After spending time in prayer, Liuzzo felt better and joined a swelling crowd of thousands of protestors who triumphantly walked to the steps of the capitol building.

After the rally at the capitol ended, Liuzzo returned to City of St. Jude where she met up with Leroy Moton, a young [19-year-old] civil rights worker who had been using Liuzzo's car to shuttle marchers back and forth between Selma and Montgomery. Liuzzo drove a group of marchers and Moton to Selma, where Moton retrieved a set of keys for another car in Montgomery that was to be used to transport additional groups of marchers. Liuzzo offered to drive Moton back to Montgomery and to bring any remaining marchers back to Selma before leaving for Detroit. … (Baumgartner 1-2).

By now it's dusk. Loitering in Selma's Silver Moon Cafe is a Klan "action team" of four KKK members from Bessemer, a suburb of Birmingham. The four are William Eaton, Eugene Thomas, Collie Wilkins, and Gary Rowe. They're hard-core Klansmen, well experienced in violence and brutality. Though the first three don't know it, Rowe is also a paid informant for the FBI and has been so for many years. All day they've been in Eugene's Chevy Impala trying to get close enough to kill Dr. King, but Army security has been too tight. As night falls, they are disappointed and discouraged

Elmer Cook, one of the three men who killed Rev. Reeb, stops by their table. "I did my job," he says, "now you go and do yours." They return to their car and go hunting for someone to kill. On Broad Street, they spot an Oldsmobile with Michigan plates heading for the bridge. A white woman is driving. Her passenger is a Black man. They have their target. The four Klansmen follow her over the bridge, hanging back until they clear the state troopers and Army jeeps still patrolling the four-lane segment of Highway 80 leading out of Selma.

Out on the dark, two-lane stretch of US-80 in Lowndes County, Liuzzo and Moton suddenly realize they are being chased. She floors it, hoping to outrun their pursuers. The Klan car is faster. Slowly it gains on them. On a long straight section with no oncoming traffic, Thomas manages to draw up alongside. The other three open fire with pistols. Mrs. Liuzzo is shot through the head, killing her instantly. She slumps over, her foot no longer on the gas. The attackers surge ahead. The Oldsmobile swerves off the road into the shoulder ditch and then up the slope of a small embankment. Moton, unwounded but covered in Viola's blood, grabs the steering wheel and manages to bring the careening car to a stop.

The Klansmen turn around and come back. They shine a light though the shattered window glass. Moton feigns death. The Klansmen drive off. Moton flags down a truck carrying marchers home from Montgomery. They take him back to Selma. The cops arrest him.

News of Mrs. Liuzzo's murder is flashed to Washington. FBI Director Hoover informs President Johnson and Attorney General Katzenbach that an informer was in the Klan car. Though he has not yet received any report from Rowe, he assures them that his unnamed operative had no gun and did no shooting — which he later learns is not the case. Hoover echoes and validates segregationist slanders and slurs, falsely accusing Mrs. Liuzzo of having needle marks on her arm from taking drugs, and "necking" with Moton who, he claims, was "snuggling up close to the white woman."

What he does not reveal to the President (or anyone else outside the Bureau) is that Rowe's FBI handlers had known in advance, and granted permission, for him to ride with the KKK "action team" that intended to kill Dr. King. And that the Bureau made no effort to place them under surveillance or prevent them from committing murder.

Nor does Hoover reveal that for the past five years while working as a paid FBI informant, Rowe has simultaneously been an active and aggressive Klansman. The Bureau knows that he shot a Black man in the chest during turmoil over school integration and, though never charged, he was suspected of complicity in the Birmingham Church bombing that killed four little girls. They also know that he participated in the savage mob attack on the Freedom Riders in Birmingham. Rowe had warned the FBI in advance that the beating was going to take place — but the FBI did nothing to prevent it. Neither did they use Rowe's information to arrest the perpetrators. Nor did they ever act on any of the other racial crimes he participated in and reported to them.

All of this is kept hidden until 1975, three years after Hoover's death. Idaho Senator Frank Church leads investigations by the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Regard to Intelligence Activities (Church Committee) that publicly reveal the concealed story of the FBI's relation with Rowe. A history that is then confirmed by a special Justice Department investigation report titled, The FBI, the Department of Justice, and Gary Thomas Rowe.

On Friday afternoon, less than 24 hours after Liuzzo's death, Johnson, Hoover, and Katzenbach announce the arrest of the four Klansmen. Charges against Rowe are dropped and he is given immunity in return for testifying against the other three. Murder is a state crime, and Alabama immediately releases the killers on bail. Segregationist whites now add "Open Season" bumper stickers to accompany their Confederate-flag license plates. Other than the assassins themselves, Leroy Moton is the only eyewitness to the murder. When he is released from jail, he is sent north for safety so the Klan can't murder him before he testifies (Murder 2-5).

Within a day of Viola’s murder, FBI agents, following their director’s dictates, prepared a report declaring that Liuzzo had been on drugs while she had been driving. Hoover himself sent a memo saying she had been “sitting very, very close to the negro in the car; that it had the appearance of a necking party.” An autopsy subsequently revealed no traces of drugs in her system and she had not had sex recently before her death.

Liuzzo and her family were smeared by the FBI, Selma officials, and the media. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover attempted to divert attention from the fact that Rowe had tipped off his handler that there might be trouble the day before Liuzzo was killed. Hoover created a file depicting Liuzzo as an unstable woman with unsavory motives and also painted her husband, Jim, who was a member of the Teamsters union, as a thug. Hoover had his agents leak these reports to the media, who ran numerous articles questioning Liuzzo's character and reasons for being in Selma. Additionally, Selma Sheriff Jim Clark obtained and widely shared a file, known as the Lane Report, from the former chief of detectives in Detroit, who also questioned Liuzzo's mental stability. The Report bolstered … J. Edgar Hoover's self-serving portrayal of Mrs. Liuzzo as a drug-taking middle-aged adulteress with a black teenage lover … Finally, at a time when gender roles and stereotypes reflected and reinforced considerable gender inequality in American society, many Americans, both men and women alike, believed Liuzzo should have stayed home and tended to her family rather than advocating for voting rights for blacks (Baumgartner 5-6).

… the July 1965 issue of The Ladies' Home Journal published a poll that asked if readers thought Liuzzo was a good mother. Fifty-five percent didn't. ("I feel sorry for what happened," said one woman in a focus group convened to talk about the Liuzzo story, "but I feel she should have stayed home and minded her own business.")

The smears took an awful toll. Anthony Liuzzo became a heavy drinker and later died. The Liuzzo children all moved away. Sally Liuzzo-Prado, the youngest, was later diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and anxiety. …

She remembered that her mother "called us every night. I learned how to cursive write and she was so excited. She told me to write my name and put it on her dresser and she'd see it when she got home” (Bates 1).

… two years ago, Liuzzo-Prado elected to return to her hometown.

"The older I got, the more I realized there was a lot of work to be done in Detroit still," she says. "And, you know, it's not so much just for her to have recognition. It's to right the wrongs done to her by J. Edgar Hoover." (Bates 3-4).

Martin Luther King attended Viola’s funeral and comforted the family. A group of people tried to break down the Liuzzos' door, and a cross was burned on their lawn. What [daughter] Sally Liuzzo-Prado remembers most vividly is the morning she returned to first grade after her mother's death.

She was wearing her saddle shoes, which her older sister, Penny, had polished.

"It was pouring rain that day. And I looked down at my saddle shoes and the white polish was coming off," she says. "These people — grown-ups — lined the street and were throwing rocks at me, calling me 'N-lover's baby.' I didn't know what that meant. I thought it was because of my shoes."

Anthony Liuzzo … withdrew his daughter from the school and had her transferred. For years, he drove her to and from school every day. Liuzzo-Prado says her father also hired two armed guards to watch their house day and night for two years (Bates 2-3).

Washington Post reporter Donna Britt interviewed Mary Liuzzo Lilleboe and her four siblings in 2016. She asked Mary who her mother was.

Mary answered: Everything you’d want a mom — and a hero — to be. She and her siblings were only too happy to discuss their mother with me recently, “not as a martyr,” as eldest daughter Penny put it, “but as this wonderful human being who loved every living creature.”

[Mary] Lilleboe was a 10th-grader in 1965. Her book report on “To Kill A Mockingbird” was in the car in which her mom died. The intolerance for suffering that had led Liuzzo to enroll in nursing classes made her acutely aware of black Americans’ feelings of invisibility. During a visit to a department store’s elaborate Christmas display, she asked Lilleboe, then 13, how she’d feel if every Santa she saw was black instead of white. When Lilleboe was 16, Liuzzo asked her how she’d feel “if the magazines I loved never put pretty white girls on their covers.” The questions saddened Lilleboe, now 69, of Grants Pass, Ore., but offered “a glimpse into a world totally different than the one I was living in.”

By any measure, the life Liuzzo gave her children was an enviable one. The wife of a Teamsters business agent, she was the nature-loving mom, whose Tennessee roots inspired barefoot strolls and an insistence on exposing her kids to planetariums, rodeos, circuses and even watching their dog giving birth, so they’d appreciate the natural world. She was the caring mom who cured son Tony’s terror of the noisy trucks spraying pesticides on the neighborhood’s trees by visiting City Hall and arranging for him to ride in one. “I’m sitting on this big truck, helping [workers],” Tony, 62, of Milwaukee, recalls. “I was never afraid after that.”

She was the fun mom, says Penny, 71, of Irwin, Tenn., describing the night she and a friend watching a scary movie were terrified when Viola — wailing ghoulishly in a fright wig, greenish makeup and Tony’s black altar-boy robes — materialized from around a dark corner.

What possessed Liuzzo to respond to her husband’s assertion that civil rights “isn’t your fight,” with, “It’s everybody’s fight,” and to join the hundreds flooding Alabama to protest?

Liuzzo’s instantaneous response to King’s appeal didn’t shock [Mary] Lilleboe. “If Mom saw a wrong . . . she took action,” she explains. When a neighbor’s house burned down one Christmas eve, her mother pounded on the door of a toy store owner’s home, insisting he open his shop so she could buy presents for the displaced family.

Her empathy was so reflexive, Lilleboe wonders, “Was Mom born with it?” As a child in Chattanooga, Liuzzo despised how cruelly she and her sister Rose Mary were treated as poor kids living in one-room shacks — yet she couldn’t help noticing black kids were treated even worse. Lilleboe never forgot her mom’s grief when the baby Liuzzo was carrying was stillborn — and her outrage when her Catholic church refused to bury her infant because it wasn’t baptized. If her love was too deep to discriminate against a baby, Liuzzo reasoned, God’s had to be immeasurably deeper, so she left Catholicism. Viola’s best friend in the world was Sara Evans, a black restaurant worker whom Liuzzo asked to care for her kids if anything befell her. After Liuzzo’s death, Evans became the brood’s second mother, especially when their dad — devastated by his beloved wife’s murder — drank too much or retreated.

…

Changing the world takes grit, grinding effort, unrelenting faith. In the journal the Liuzzos obtained from the FBI, [Viola] … wrote, “I can’t sit back and watch my people suffer,” about folks who looked nothing like her. Explains Lilleboe: “She actually believed it when Christ said that the suffering and needy are our people. Mom saw all other human beings as her people” (Britt 7-13, 21).

On Friday afternoon, less than 24 hours after Liuzzo's death, [President] Johnson, Hoover, and Katzenbach announce the arrest of the four Klansmen. Charges against Rowe are dropped and he is given immunity in return for testifying against the other three. Murder is a state crime, and Alabama immediately releases the killers on bail. Segregationist whites now add "Open Season" bumper stickers to accompany their Confederate-flag license plates. Other than the assassins themselves, Leroy Moton is the only eyewitness to the murder. When he is released from jail, he is sent north for safety so the Klan can't murder him before he testifies.

On May 3rd, six weeks after the murder, Collie Wilkins is put on trial for Liuzzo's murder. Whites jam the Lowndes County courthouse in Hayneville to show their support for a KKK killer. Blacks dare not attend. The jury, of course, is all white. And in accordance with southern tradition, the jury is also all male (white women being considered too pure, fragile, and delicate, to face the brutal underpinnings of the southern way of life).

The prosecution presents an irrefutable case of first degree (premeditated) murder, laying out both forensic and investigative evidence, and the eyewitness testimony of both Leroy Moton and Gary Rowe, who is now revealed under heavy guard as an FBI informant. During cross examination, Matt Murphy, the Klan's lawyer (or "Klonsel"), accuses Moton of shooting Liuzzo after having "interracial sex" with her, "under the hypnotic spell of narcotics." Robert Shelton, Imperial Wizard of the Alabama KKK, sits with Wilkins at the defendant's table. After the prosecution rests its case, Murphy offers a cursory 20-minute defense. Then he attacks the prosecution and the victim. He characterizes Mrs. Liuzzo as, "A white nigger who turned her car over to a black nigger for the purpose of hauling niggers and communists back and forth." And he accuses Rowe of being a liar, "... as treacherous as a rattlesnake ... a traitor and a pimp and an agent of Castro and I don't know what all," for violating his Klan oath of loyalty and secrecy.

Though Wilkins's guilt is obvious, reporters and white onlookers assume the local white jury will quickly acquit him — as is the southern custom in racial cases. But to everyone's surprise, the jury fails to bring back a swift verdict of innocent on all counts. Instead, their deliberations are carried over to the next day. A mistrial is declared when the jury reports they are hopelessly deadlocked 10-2 for conviction on a manslaughter charge. This means they've chosen not to reach a guilty verdict on first or second degree murder, but 10 of them are willing to convict on the lesser charge of manslaughter (killing in the heat of understandable passion without premeditation or malice aforethought).

Some reporters believe that 10 Lowndes County whites willing to convict a Klansman of anything is a sign of racial progress. But most Movement activists assume it's because the victim was both white and a woman. In their opinion, if it had been Leroy Moton shot in the head, or a white male activist like Mickey Schwerner, a quick verdict of not guilty would have been returned.

Syndicated journalist Inez Robb is the only reporter who dares raise a fundamental question:

What sorely troubles me, if we accept the prosecution's account of the slaying, is the moral aspect of Rowe's presence in the car ... Under what kind of secret orders did Rowe work? [Was he expected to join in crime, strictly observe, or try to prevent murder?] It is one woman's opinion that the FBI owes the nation an explanation of its action in the Liuzzo case. — Inez Robb.

No explanation is ever forthcoming from the FBI. Bureau Director Hoover's personal vindictiveness against anyone who questions or criticizes either himself or the Bureau is notorious. … (Murder 5-8).

Viola Liuzzo's murder prompted a variety of responses from both the government and the American people. President Lyndon Johnson ordered an investigation of the Ku Klux Klan and petitioned Congress to make it legal to file federal murder charges against killers of civil rights workers. Additionally, Liuzzo's murder, like James Reeb's murder in Selma only two weeks prior, increased support for the Voting Rights Act, which Congress passed and President Johnson signed into law in August 1965 (Baumgartner 7).

On October 20, Wilkins is placed on trial a second time. Again, Leroy Moton and Rowe testify. Replacing Murphy as defense counsel is former FBI agent and Birmingham Mayor Arthur Hanes. Like Murphy, he vilifies Mrs. Liuzzo and smears Moton, asking, "Leroy, was it part of your duties as transportation officer to make love to Mrs. Liuzzo?" This time the all white, all male, Lowndes County jury requires just 90 minutes to return a verdict of not Guilty on all charges.

In December 1965, Collie Wilkins, William Eaton, and Eugene Thomas, are tried by John Doar in federal court before Judge Frank Johnson. They are convicted of violating Mrs. Liuzzo's civil rights and sentenced to the maximum term of 10 years in prison. Rowe is given a $10,000 bonus by the FBI (equal to about $73,000 in 2012) and disappears into the secrecy of witness protection.

…

In 1977, the Liuzzo children manage to obtain her FBI file through the Freedom of Information Act and discover that the Bureau had orchestrated a covert slander and smear campaign to vilify their mother. They file a lawsuit claiming that the FBI knew Rowe and the other Klansmen were out to kill, and that by failing to take action, the Bureau effectively conspired in her murder. A judge dismisses their case in 1983, ruling there is no evidence of an FBI conspiracy to kill Mrs. Liuzzo specifically, and that the FBI could not be held liable for failing to prevent a crime.

When subpoenaed by a grand jury, Wilkins and Thomas testify that it was Rowe who actually shot Mrs. Liuzzo. They pass a lie-detector test and two Birmingham cops testify that Rowe bragged to them that he was the one who killed her. Rowe is indicted for her murder in 1978, but the federal government quashes the case on the basis of his immunity deal for testifying in the 1965 trials. Without an impartial investigation and actual trial, it is impossible to determine who is telling the truth — Rowe, a violent Klansman and informer, or the two convicted killers and police witnesses from a department known to be infiltrated by the KKK (Murder 9-10).

Works cited:

Bates, Karen Grigsby. “Killed For Taking Part In 'Everybody's Fight'.” NPR. August 12, 2013. Web. https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2013/08/12/209595935/killed-for-taking-part-in-everybody-s-fight

Baumgartner, Neal. “Viola Gregg Liuzzo.” Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia. Ferris State University. Web. https://www.ferris.edu/htmls/news/jimcrow/witnesses/violaliuzzo.htm

Britt, Donna. “A White Mother Went to Alabama to Fight for Civil Rights. The Klan Killed Her for It.” The Washington Post. December 15, 2017. Web. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2017/12/15/a-white-mother-went-to-alabama-to-fight-for-civil-rights-the-klan-killed-her-for-it/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.ce6a3f214fc1

Cannon, Carl M. “From Detroit to Selma: Viola Liuzzo's Sacrifice.” RealClear Politics. January 2, 2018. Web. https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2018/01/02/from_detroit_to_selma_viola_liuzzos_sacrifice_135894.html

“Murder and Character Assassination of Viola Liuzzo.” The March to Montgomery (Mar). Civil Rights Movement History 1965: Selma & the March to Montgomery. Civil Rights Movement History & Timeline. Web. https://www.crmvet.org/tim/timhis65.htm#1965m2m