The following poem, ‘Leroy and Viola,’ was written after I read a newspaper article about a white woman named Viola Gregg Liuzzo, who sacrificed her life for the American Civil Rights movement, and her companion on that fateful day, African American freedom fighter, Leroy Moton. I had the honor and privilege of speaking with Mr. Moton by phone on several occasions after writing this poem, and marvel at his bravery and dedication to the cause for which he nearly died, as well.
Leroy and Viola
Come Saturday morning, poor black men
gathered on street corners, waiting for white
men in Cadillacs to drive by slow, shouting
hey boy from their rolled-down windows, get
in, which meant there was a job digging ditches
or other backbreaking work for less money
than it cost to feed the family dog. Nights
were harder, what with hooded gangs of racists
wrapped in bed sheets roaming the countryside,
and woe to anybody who wasn’t white once
those half-drunk, hatemongering mobs with
their burning crosses and lengths of rope,
arrived on the scene. So in 1965 when married
mother-of-five Viola Gregg Liuzzo volunteered
to drive nineteen-year-old Leroy Moton back
to Selma—both fresh from a freedom march
in Montgomery, Alabama—the sight of a white
woman with a black man in the front seat of
a vehicle sporting Michigan plates didn’t sit
well with Klansmen who were, as usual, wild
as pent-up ponies in a barn blaze. So they chased
the pair down and fired two bullets into Liuzzo’s
brain, laughing like loons when the car careened
into a ditch. Covered in blood, Moton played
dead—surviving the shots, the crash, and the killers’
swift perusal of the wreckage. But Viola Liuzzo
is gone except in memory, where the same reel
runs over and over in Leroy Moton’s mind:
a pretty woman’s profile, pale as milk against
the purpling sky, and his hand, dark as rivers
on the radio dial—strangers joined forever
by history, seconds before the slaughter.
By Terri Kirby Erickson, excerpt,
A Lake of Light and Clouds,
© 2014
