DETROIT — For 24 years, a stone marker has stood along U.S. 80 in Alabama’s Lowndes County, near the spot where Viola Gregg Liuzzo was fatally shot by Klansmen while shuttling demonstrators after the 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery voting rights march.
But in Liuzzo’s hometown of Detroit, such public recognition is scarce. A wooden marker bearing her name sits on a fence beside a small neighborhood playfield. Last year, an exhibit in Lansing included Liuzzo among Michigan women who contributed significantly to civil rights.
That will change April 10. Liuzzo’s former school, Wayne State University, plans to award her an honorary doctor of laws degree. It’s the first posthumous honorary degree in the 145-year-old school’s history. Wayne State also will dedicate a tree or green space for Liuzzo.
Liuzzo’s five children are invited to the ceremony. Liuzzo’s husband, Anthony Liuzzo Sr., died in 1978.
“I cried,” said Liuzzo’s daughter, Mary Liuzzo Lilleboe, of her reaction to Wayne State’s decision. “It’s the highest honor an educational institution can bestow on someone. It’s the honor that’s being paid to her. She’s a civil rights giant.”
Kim Trent, a member of Wayne State’s Board of Governors, broached the idea a decade ago as president of Wayne State’s black alumni organization. The school declined, citing its policy of not awarding posthumous degrees, Trent said.
“The truth of the matter is that Viola is worthy because she is deceased,” Trent said. “She is a civil rights martyr. I understood there was something more important at stake.”
Trent was elected to the same board in 2012 and recently took another run at recognition for Liuzzo. They passed the recommendation in February.
“My colleagues were like, ‘Sure, we should do this,’ ” Trent said.
Liuzzo was a nursing student at Wayne State when she joined the civil rights movement. At the time of her death, the white, 39-year-old mother also was a member of Detroit’s branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
From her home, Liuzzo watched televised news reports of demonstrators being beaten by police in Selma on March 7, 1965, during the first attempt to march to Montgomery, a day known as “Bloody Sunday.”
That march was followed two days later by another, abbreviated demonstration led by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. The Rev. James Reeb, a white Unitarian minister from Boston, was severely beaten that night and later died. Just over two weeks after Reeb’s death, Liuzzo too was dead, struck in the head by shots fired from a passing car. Her black passenger, 19-year-old Leroy Moton, was wounded but survived. Four Ku Klux Klan members were arrested, and an all-white, all-male jury acquitted three of them of murder. Those same three were convicted of federal charges in Liuzzo’s death. The fourth assailant was granted immunity.
