In 1941, the Gregg family moved to Ypsilanti, Michigan, where her father sought a job assembling bombs at the Ford Motor Company. It was during her formative years that Liuzzo realized the unjustness of segregation and racism, as she and her family, in similar conditions of great poverty, were still afforded social privilege and amenities denied to African Americans under the Jim Crow laws. This would eventually have a powerful impact on Liuzzo’s activism. Having spent much of her childhood and adolescence poor in Tennessee, Viola experienced the segregated nature of the South firsthand. The family moved to Chattanooga, Tennessee when Viola was six. The family descended further into poverty and decided to move in pursuit of better job opportunities. Gregg, as she could only pick up sporadic, short-term, teaching positions. While on the job, Viola’s father was injured, and, during the Great Depression, could not provide for his family as a coal miner: the Greggs became solely dependent on Eva’s income. The couple had one other daughter, Mary, in 1930. Liuzzo was born Viola Fauver Gregg in 1925, in California, Pennsylvania, the elder daughter of Eva Wilson, a teacher, and Heber Gregg, a coal miner and World War I veteran. In addition to other honors, Liuzzo's name is today inscribed on the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama created by Maya Lin. The FBI later leaked what were purported to be salacious details about Liuzzo which were never proved or substantiated in any way.
Rowe testified against the shooters and was moved and given an assumed name by the FBI. One of the four Klansmen in the car from which the shots were fired was Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) informant Gary Rowe. Driving back from a trip shuttling fellow activists to the Montgomery airport, she was shot dead by members of the Ku Klux Klan. Liuzzo participated in the successful Selma to Montgomery marches and helped with coordination and logistics. In March 1965 Liuzzo, then a housewife and mother of 5 with a history of local activism, heeded the call of Martin Luther King Jr and traveled from Detroit, Michigan to Selma, Alabama in the wake of the Bloody Sunday attempt at marching across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Viola Fauver Gregg Liuzzo (Ap– March 25, 1965) was a Unitarian Universalist civil rights activist from Michigan.
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