National

Slain Civil Rights Activist to Receive Posthumous Degree

Published

11 years ago

March 21, 2015

Reporter II

Memorial to Viola Fauver Gregg Liuzzo in Lowndes County, Alabama. (Carol M. Highsmith/public domain)

Corey Williams, ASSOCIATED PRESS

DETROIT (AP) — 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 on 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 have been invited to the ceremony. Liuzzo’s husband, Anthony Liuzzo Sr., died in 1978.

“I cried,” Liuzzo’s daughter, Mary Liuzzo Lilleboe, said 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, initially 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 NAACP.

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 that became 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. An all-white jury acquitted three white men of murder charges in Reeb’s death.

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 by pretending to be dead. Four Ku Klux Klan members were arrested, and an all-white, all-male jury acquitted three of them of murder. Those same three were later convicted of federal charges in Liuzzo’s death. The fourth assailant was granted immunity and placed in the federal witness protection program.

Lilleboe said she was 17 when her mother quietly drove to Alabama the weekend before the third attempt to march from Selma to Montgomery, planned for March 25.

“If she saw wrong and she couldn’t right it, she took action,” said Lilleboe. “She always told us the story that she was treated badly because she was poor, but the ‘little black kids were treated worse.'”

Liuzzo didn’t reveal where she was going until well after she left, because she didn’t want her husband to stop her, Lilleboe said. She did, however, contact her family regularly by phone.

“She called and she was rather jubilant because the march had made it,” Lilleboe recalled. “She was coming home. My brothers picked up little pretend signs and started marching around singing ‘We Shall Overcome.’

“About midnight, dad got a phone call and they said ‘your wife … there has been an accident.’ We knew she had been murdered.”

Law professor Peter Hammer, director of the Damon J. Keith Center for Civil Rights at Wayne State, said non-blacks who fought to dismantle Jim Crow segregation “were subject to the same vitriol” aimed at blacks, “and in some respects — even more so.”

“For a white woman to cross the line took even more courage and was probably subject to more hatred,” Hammer said. Also, he said, there is a tendency, in telling civil rights history, to sideline roles played by women of all races.

The Alabama marker honoring Liuzzo was erected by the Women of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1991. At the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, Liuzzo is the only white woman honored among the martyrs.

After Liuzzo’s death, her family endured a cross burning and hate mail at their Detroit home. Her children were harassed at school. Liuzzo’s husband hired armed guards for protection. A smear campaign, engineered by the FBI, hinted that Liuzzo used drugs and had illicit relationships with black men.

Liuzzo’s family filed a $2 million negligence claim against the federal government in 1977, saying the FBI knew ahead of time that Liuzzo’s killers planned to commit violence and did nothing to stop them.

The government refused to negotiate that claim. The family filed a lawsuit that went to non-jury trial in federal court in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 1983, and was dismissed.

“What’s nice about what’s taking place now is that nobody is remembering the lies,” Hammer said. “People are remembering her life and courage.”

Lilleboe, who now lives in Oregon, is proud of her mother’s enduring legacy. She has traveled to Selma for “Bloody Sunday” commemorations for the past 11 years, including the 50th anniversary earlier this month.

“They embraced me with their whole hearts … because I’m my mother’s daughter,” Lilleboe said. “When I see the difference in their eyes I am so proud of my mother.”
Copyright 2015 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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Poll Shows Support for Policies That Help Families Afford Child Care

BLACKPRESSUSA NEWSWIRE — New national polling shows persistent voter concern about the affordability and availability of child care for working parents, alongside broad support across key demographic groups for federal child care policies that help families afford care.

Published

2 days ago

March 2, 2026

Oakland Post

By First Five Years Fund

New national polling shows persistent voter concern about the affordability and availability of child care for working parents, alongside broad support across key demographic groups for federal child care policies that help families afford care.

The national survey was conducted by UpOne Insight on behalf of the First Five Years Fund from January 13–18, 2026.

Key findings include:

• Parents need help: 80% of voters say the ability of working parents to find and afford child care is either in a state of crisis or a major problem.

• This is an affordability issue: 82% believe federal child care funding will help lower costs for working families — including 69% of Republicans, 84% of Independents, and 94% of Democrats.

• And there continues to be strong support (62%) for the Child Care and Development Block Grant (CCDBG), a federal program that makes it possible for hundreds of thousands of families to afford safe, quality care for their children while parents work or go to school, including a majority of Republicans, 63% of Independents and 72% of Democrats.

• Support for funding child care programs remains strong: 75% believe child care funding should be increased or kept at current levels — including 75% of Republicans, 85% of Independents, and 97% of Democrats.

• 74% say funding for child care is an important and good use of tax dollars, including a majority of Republicans, three-quarters of Independents, and nine in ten Democrats.

FFYF Executive Director Sarah Rittling said, “Voters across the country are sending a clear message: federal child care and early learning programs work. These investments help parents stay in the workforce, strengthen families, and support healthy child development. They have also long had strong bipartisan support in Congress. At a time when affordability is top of mind for families, continued federal funding is essential to ensure child care remains accessible and within reach.”

First Five Years Fund works to protect, prioritize, and build bipartisan support for quality child care and early learning programs at the federal level. Reliable, affordable, and high-quality early learning and child care can be transformative, not only enhancing a child’s prospects for a brighter future but also bolstering working parents and fostering economic stability nationwide.

We work with Congress and the Administration to identify federal solutions that work for families with young children, as well as states and communities. We work with policymakers to identify ways to increase access to affordable, high-quality child care and early learning programs for children. And we collaborate with advocacy groups to help align best practices with the best possible policies. http://www.ffyf.org

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Oakland Post: Week of February 25 – March 3, 2026

The printed Weekly Edition of the Oakland Post: Week of – February 25 – March 3, 2026

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4 days ago

March 1, 2026

Oakland Post

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Trump’s MAGA Allies are Creating Executive Order Plan to Steal the 2026 Midterms

NNPA NEWSWIRE — The document that could lead to an executive order proposes using the claim that China interfered with the 2020 elections as grounds to “declare a national emergency.” The move would be an unprecedented step that would grant Trump new authority over the voting systems in the U.S.

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Oakland Post

By Lauren Victoria Burke, NNPA Newswire Correspondent

A group of MAGA pro-Trump activists, who say they are working in coordination with the White House, are circulating a 17-page draft executive order that would claim without evidence that China interfered with the 2020 presidential election. Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential to President Joe Biden by over 7 million votes. Since Trump lost to Biden in 2020, he has repeatedly claimed that the election was “stolen” without evidence. The report of a group of “Trump allies” preparing an executive order to give Trump power over elections was first reported by The Washington Post.

The lies around the right-wing campaign that pushed falsehoods that the 2020 election was stolen was trafficked through right-wing media, particularly Fox News. Fox News was then sued for defamation for the claims by Dominion Voting Systems. Fox lost the case and had to settle for the largest defamation amount on record of $787.5 million in April 2023.

The document that could lead to an executive order proposes using the claim that China interfered with the 2020 elections as grounds to “declare a national emergency.” The move would be an unprecedented step that would grant Trump new authority over the voting systems in the U.S.

The story in The Washington Post arrives as Trump increasingly signals that he may take actions that would alter the result of the 2026 midterms. The Republicans are widely expected to lose as their approval ratings plummet as a result of a failing economy under Trump. Over 50 members of Congress have announced they will retire this year and not return in 2027.

The Trump Department of Justice, which now has a large image of Trump on the side of it, “sued five new states Thursday [Feb. 26, 2026] demanding access to their unredacted voter rolls — escalating a campaign that has been rejected by multiple federal courts and faces resistance from Republican-led states as well,” according to Democracy Docket, a group that works to protect voting rights.

Trump claimed back in late 2020, the last year of his first term, that he had the authority to issue an executive order related to mail-in voting for the 2020 elections — which he would then lose. But the Constitution states that control of elections lies with the states. As the GOP works to place hurdles in front of voting, Democrats worked to make voting easier.

In March 2021, President Biden signed an executive order calling on federal agencies to expand voting access as part of the Biden Administration’s effort “to promote and defend the right to vote for all Americans who are legally entitled to participate in elections.”

Trump’s focus is clearly on altering the November 2026 midterm elections. Trump’s polling numbers and the elections and special elections that have taken place around the U.S. over the last year clearly indicate that Republicans are about to be hit by a blue wave of Democratic victories.

Lauren Victoria Burke is an independent investigative journalist and the founder of Black Virginia News. She is a political analyst who appears on #RolandMartinUnfiltered and hosts the show LAUREN LIVE on YouTube @LaurenVictoriaBurke. She can be contacted at LBurke007@gmail.com and on twitter at @LVBurke