Wo Zone media.
Before her children even knew their mother had been killed, the federal government was already busy rewriting the story of her death. She had lived a good life.
Though not a long one.
She was happily remarried after a divorce, and despite the demands of motherhood, she went back to school in her thirties. People who loved her described her as a Christian woman, a devoted mother, and someone who believed passionately in loving everyone, so much so that she put that belief into action. And as the FBI commandeered the investigation into her death, her grieving spouse was left trying to explain what had happened to her children. Her youngest was just six years old.
She had both hands on the steering wheel when she was.
Shot in the head.
She was dead before her car came to a stop, crashing not far from the spot where her killer had fired at her. The person she was traveling with that day was miraculously not hit. There should have been no
way to spin it. The investigation revealed the shooter and his motive almost immediately, but federal officials seated doubt, planning stories in the media that she was sexually immoral that she neglected her children, that her spouse was a person with questionable associates, she was an extremist, an outside agitator, she had dangerous left wing politics, and she might even be a communist. She was sick, degenerate, and she brought this on herself. Of course, the FBI director spreading these
lies about her knew they weren't true. But in March of nineteen sixty five, Jay Edgar Hoover was desperate to distract from the fact that one of the clans man who killed Viola the USO, was on his pay room. I'm Molly Conger, and this is We're gude of guys. This is not the story I promised you last week.
I'm so sorry. I'm sure you already guessed that. I know.
I ended last week's episode with a teaser for something fairly specific, and I will write that episode.
I will.
It's poor form to complain about a job I do in my pajamas, but it's not easy writing what is essentially a twenty five page research paper on a new topic every week. The only way it works is to write about something.
I'm genuinely.
And I'm so lucky that I get to do that, but my heart's got to be in it, and this week my heart was troubled. I usually finished writing pretty late on a Monday night Tuesday morning, if we're being specific about it. My editor Rory really only gets about a day and a half with the file to clean it up, put the music in it, and bed the audio clips and work whatever magic that he does that.
Makes it sound good.
And the edit I listened to on Wednesday afternoon is the one you hear Thursday morning. It's a tight timeline, so I really have to lock in on what I'm going to research and write about pretty early in the week. And obviously I knew what I was going to be working on for this week's episode because it was a continuation of the story from last week's.
Episode until it wasn't On Tuesdays, I've usually been up most of the night, so I don't get a lot done.
I try to run all my errands for the week on Wednesdays, but by Thursday I'm already starting to feel like I'm running out of time and it's way too late to change my plans. I've got to lock myself in my office and focus on the topic I've chosen. I was supposed to be writing about that Nazi serial killer. I promised you, But this past week we all watched a woman die on Wednesday, and I still ran my errands.
It's the only day I have time for it. But I went about my business in kind of a daze, and I wept for her, for her wife, for her children, for all of us, for the world we have to live in. But we all still had to get up and go to work the next day. So on Thursday and I sat at my computer and I kept taking notes for the episode I was trying to write. On Friday, more video of that murder came out.
I watched it.
Maybe you did too. If you didn't, you don't have to. There's no moral requirement for you to bear witness in that way.
I promise you.
But I did because I always do. And it hit me pretty hard for the obvious reasons. Right, I was watching a murder. I find myself doing that not infrequently in this line of work, and it never gets easier, and if it does, I'll quit. But something in particular was stuck rattling around in my head. In the moments before a federal agent shot and killed Renee Good, she smiled at him, and she said, that's fine, dude, I'm.
Not mad at you.
That's a striking moment, even just on its own. She really wasn't angry. You can see her face. She's brave, she's determined, but she's telling the truth.
She isn't mad.
Her presence there wasn't out of anger but love. She isn't mad at this particular man. She's doing her part against an injustice that's bigger than either of them. This isn't a show about current events. This isn't a show about the news. This isn't an episode about Renee Good. That's not what I write about, and that's not what you're here to listen to. But it isn't my fault
that history rhymes. I wish it didn't. I wish the decade I've spent writing about white supremacist violence wasn't increasingly relevant in the way I think about current events.
But it is.
And when I watched that video, I didn't just see Renee Good. I saw Viola Luzo. And when I heard Renee Good speak her last words, I didn't just hear her. I heard Michael Schwerner. Michael Schwerner, James Cheney, and Andrew Goodman were field workers with the Congress of Racial Equality, and on June twenty first, nineteen sixty four, they were murdered by a mob of klansmen that included members of
the local sheriff's department. When Alton Wayne Roberts pulled Michael Schwerner from his car, he asked him, are you that N word lover? The two men were face to face, just inches apart. The klansmen had both of his hands on Schwerner's shoulders, having spun him around to look him in the eye, and Schwerner, a twenty four year old Jewish social worker from New York City, looked back at that clan and he said, Sir, I know just how
you feel. He was calm, he wasn't angry. He was trying to start a conversation.
I think.
I guess we can't really know what kind of dialogue he was trying to have, because that's as far as he got. The klansman still had one hand on one of Schwerner's shoulders when he used his other hand to draw his gun, and he shot Michael Schwerner point blank in the chest, killing him instantly. And I thought, too of Margaret Ann Nott, who was just sixteen years old when she was killed in Butler, Alabama, in nineteen seventy one.
She was sitting on the ground with her eyes closed in silent prayer when she was hit by the car that rammed into the permitted protest she was participating in that morning. As Margaret lay on the ground dying, she repeated over and over again, I died for freedom.
I died for freedom.
And I thought too of Talisian non Kai Mech, who, along with Ricky John Best, was one of two men who died trying to protect two teenage girls on a train in Portland in twenty seventeen. A Somali immigrant, a young black Muslim girl wearing her hyjab, was being threatened, and those strangers gave their lives to stop a neo Nazi from hurting her. And after Tualisian was stabbed, as he lay there bleeding out in the lap of a stranger on the floor of the train, his last words were,
tell everyone on this train, I love them. I'm not mad at you. I know just how you feel. I died for freedom. Tell everyone on this train, I love them.
I'm not mad at you. I'm not mad at you. I know just how you feel. I'm not mad at you.
Their words, all of them, the last words of people killed by Nazis and klansmen and agents of the state who served the same ends as those Nazis and those clansmen, were drowning out my own thoughts. And I was reading and writing and trying to do my silly little job, trying to think my own thoughts. But I couldn't hear my own thoughts over the sound of the blood pounding in my head. And it sounded like Renee Good. It sounded like Michael Schwerner.
It sounded like.
Delesian and Margaret and Ricky and Viola and Heather Higher and so many people who woke up on a day they didn't know as their last, and they did something brave, not because they were angry or violent, but because they loved the very idea of love so much.
And I didn't write a word that day.
On Saturday night, I was sitting in my office with a book in my lap and thirty eight browser tabs open on my computer, still trying to figure out how I'm going to write six thousand words about anything this week. And I saw a video of a vigil for Renee Good held on a rainy Friday evening in New Hampshire.
Rob Hirschfeld, the Bishop of the Episcopal Church of New Hampshire, must have spent the day hearing the same inescapable litany of names that was pounding in my own head, because he reminded the crowd in New Hampshire of Jonathan Daniels, a New Hampshire native who died in a corner store in a tiny town outside Montgomery, Alabama, in August of
nineteen sixty five. Daniels was a seminarian, still a year away from finishing his studies before he could pursue ordination, and he'd spent the spring semester of nineteen sixty five working in Selma, Alabama. He returned to Alabama during his summer break that year to register voters, tutor children, and help black families get to church. He went back to Alabama that summer to do what he felt God had
called him to. When the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee staged a protest outside of a whites only department store in Fort Deposit, Alabama. He was one of thirty protesters who were arrested. After six days in jail. The whole group was released, but they were left stranded in the middle
of nowhere. While they were waiting there for the ride back to town, the group decided to send a small delegation to a nearby corner store to buy some cold sodas they'd all spent six days sweating in an Alabama jail and this was one of the only stores in the area that would serve black customers. Jonathan Daniels and father Richard Morris Row walked to the store with Joyce Bailey and Ruby Sales, two black teenage girls, both activists with
the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Ruby Sales, just seventeen years old that summer, reached the door first. She recalled that afternoon in an interview for a PBS documentary two decades later.
And so when we got to the store, as we approached a store and began to go up the steps, suddenly standing there was Tom Coleman that at that time I didn't know his name. I found that out later, and I recognized that he had a shotgun, and I recognized that he was yelling something about black bitches. But in some real ways, with that confrontation, my mind kind of blinked, and I wasn't processing all that was happening.
And so as I was trying to process the meaning of this, suddenly I fell a tug because I was in front and Jonathan was behind me, and I fell a tug and someone and the next thing I knew, there was this blast and I had fallen down, and I remember thinking, God, this is what it feels like to be dead. I thought I was dead, And just as I was trying to sort of deal with being dead, I heard another shot go off.
But she wasn't dead.
The shot Ruby heard as she was lying on the ground contemplating her own apparent death was meant for Joyce, but Father Morris Row had wrapped himself around her as he turned to run.
Only Joyce got away.
The priest was shot in the back, leaving him unable to walk for several years. The first blast from the deputy's shotgun, the one aimed straight at Ruby, hadn't touched her. The tug, she felt. The force that knocked her to the ground, where she now lay covered in blood, had been Jonathan Daniels pushing her out of the way, and the blood pooling around her was his. He'd taken the full force of the shotgun blast point blank, killing him instantly.
In the video of that rainy vigil in New Hampshire, Bishop Hirschfeld shared the story of Jonathan Daniel's death to make it inescapably clear how serious he was as a man of the cloth. Thoughts and prayers are sort of his stock in trade. At a vigil like that one, that's all anyone really expects of him. His thoughts and his prayers, that's all anyone really has to offer after a tragedy. But the Bishop opened his remarks by wondering whether the time for eloquent words had passed. Thoughts and
prayers are beautiful, but they aren't moving the needle. Jonathan Daniels didn't fight for civil rights with a strongly worded letter or a signature on a petition, or a beautiful sermon from the pulpit. He pressed his body into the barrel of a shotgun.
I have told the clergy of the Episcopal Dioceis of New Hampshire that we may be entering into that same witness, and I've asked them to get their affairs in order.
To make sure they have their wills written, because it may be that now is no longer the time for statements, but for us, with our bodies, to stand between the powers of this world and the most vulnerable.
I watched that video on Saturday night, and I thought about what it means to live in a world where his words are frightening and comforting to me an equal measure. I hope the clergy of the Episcopal Diocese of New Hampshire don't die the way Jonathan Daniels died. But more than that, I wish we did not live in a world where a shotgun is pointed.
At a child. But we do, and they might.
And while we try to untangle the factors that led to the loaded gun aimed the most vulnerable among us, maybe the best we can hope for is the courage to absorb some of that pain. I woke up Sday morning and the first thing I saw on my phone was the news that a synagogue in Mississippi had burned. Terrible news, the kind of news I will definitely follow up on eventually. Whoever would do something like that as almost certainly the kind of guy I write about or will one day.
I wasn't quite.
Awake yet, but I recognized the name of the synagogue. Impossible. Really, I'm not Jewish, and I've never been to Mississippi, but beth Is Reel Congregation and Jackson, Mississippi, sounded so familiar because it was bombed by the Klan in nineteen sixty seven. Everything old is new again. There's nothing new.
Under the sun.
And I was running out of time to write something for this week's episode, and it felt like history was demanding to be acknowledged. I stared at my computer for a while, and on Sunday afternoon, I went to a vigil for Renee Good. It was held in a little park downtown. Hundreds of people filled the park, spilling out onto the sidewalks. I saw friends and neighbors and strangers, babies and strollers and old women pushing walkers. I saw the pastor of a church in my neighborhood wearing a
rainbow scarf and a warm smile. I saw the man running to be my congressman, standing quietly in the crowd, not campaigning, just present. People had homemade signs. Some of them were impressive works of art, and others were hastily repurposed from the last protest. I saw a child wearing a cardboard box painted white. It was a little ice cube costume with third graders against ice scrawled on the back in pink marker. And I saw an older woman carrying a single sheet of plain printer paper with a
phrase written on it in a black marker. It said, you can't kill us all. That's what one of Renee's neighbors shouted at the ice agents, trying to chase off the crowd that gathered at the scene after she was shot and killed. Instead of running away from the sound of gunfire, a crowd formed, bearing witness and demanding justice. Before her body was even cold. They had just witnessed an execution, and their answer was you can't kill us All.
Those words spoken by an ordinary person in an extraordinary circumstance, traveled halfway across the country to be there on that sign, a sign carried by another entirely ordinary person, an ordinary person who recognizes that she too, now finds herself in an extraordinary circumstance. Normally I make careful notes of what was said and who spoke. But I just paced, walking laps around that two hundred square foot patch of grass, feeling like the weight of history would crush us all.
Walking home afterwards, I knew I wouldn't write another word that day. I don't have to walk down Fourth Street to get home, but I always do. It's been almost nine years since a woman I never met was killed there. There's a purple bow tied around the post holding up a no parking sign. Closest to the spot where she died. The brick wall of the neighboring office building is covered
in chalk messages. I guess it's mostly sheltered from the rain somehow, because it isn't derotating changing set of messages. It's a monument. Maybe it's never rained at an angle in that narrow street. I don't understand it. There are thousands of little men messages scrawled on the walls on either side of Fourth Street, but the biggest one reads.
Gone but not forgotten. And I know that.
One's been untouched for at least eight years.
Maybe it's older than that.
But the first time I remember seeing it was when I stopped by on her birthday, May twenty ninth, twenty eighteen. Heather Hier would have been thirty three that day if she hadn't been dead for a year. So after the vigil for Renee Good, I stopped on the street where Heather Higher was killed, and I stood in the street where she died with tears in my eyes.
Until a car came.
And then I remembered that we all still have to live in the world and go about our business. So what I mean to say is, as I'm writing this, it's Monday. I do most of my writing on Mondays. It's a bad habit, but usually when I'm writing on Monday, I've spent all week researching and taking notes, and I kind of have an idea what the words will be. But I woke up this morning and I started over. Because every time I sat down to research and take notes and plot out the story I was supposed to
write this week, I cried. I cried for Renee and for Heather, and for Michael Schwerner and James Cheney and Andrew Goodman and Mayola Luso and Talisian and Ricky and Margaret and Jonathan, and for all the martyrs of the struggle for freedom whose stories we don't know, not yet. I couldn't write a regular episode of my show because my heart demanded something else. I know this isn't a
serious job. I make an entertainment product. I'm a journalist and a researcher, and I take my work very seriously. But I'm not delusional. This is a podcast. It's in your ear on your way to work, while you wash dishes, walk your dog. But if I didn't believe just a little bit this was important, I would have given up
by now. I wouldn't work this hard to write these stories if I didn't think there was some value in understanding the history of writing political violence, in fitting those pieces together to show the connections between these allegedly isolated, random acts of violence. As bewildering and terrifying and overwhelming as things seem right now, I want to help you see that these are not unprecedented times.
They are, in fact, very.
Precedented, and the precedents are pretty dark, but there are things we can learn from the past, and there's comfort in knowing we aren't the first ones to walk into this darkness. So I didn't write the story I promised you last week. And I can't tell you anything you don't already know about what's in the news today. But I can tell you a little bit about a story that rhymes. I can tell you about the day Viola le Uso died. On March twenty fifth, nineteen sixty five,
marchers poured into Montgomery, Alabama. The front of the march reached the capitol steps around noon, but the crowd of more than twenty five thousand stretched out over two miles long, and the end of the march didn't arrive until more than an hour later. A program from the event lists more than a dozen speakers. There were speakers from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Congress for Racial Equality, the NAACP.
John Lewis spoke on behalf of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Nobel Peace Prize winner and New and Under Secretary General Ralph Bunch gave a speech. A Philip Randolph spoke the march from Selma to Montgomery had been hard fought. It took nineteen days to cross those fifty four miles. On the first attempt, the march didn't even make it out of Selma. It ended the very day it began, a
day that quickly became known as Bloody Sunday. Dozens of marchers were injured and seventeen were hospitalized after brutal beatings from the police waiting for them on the other side of the Edmund Pettis Bridge. The second attempt was quickly foiled by a court injunction. Hours after the march was called off, a white mob attacked three Unitarian ministers who were in town for the march. James Reeb died from his injuries. By the time the march to Montgomery started
for the third time, the stakes were clear. A minister had been beaten to death. The chairman of the Student on Violent Coordinating Committee had been struck over the head with a billy club, fracturing a skull. They'd been beaten and tearcass and run down with horses and dogs. They knew they would face violence, they understood they may face death. And when they finally reached Montgomery, the main event that afternoon was a speech from doctor Martin.
Luther King Junior. You may not know this one, at least not as well as you know.
Famous speech is like I have a dream from the march on Washington, or I've been to the mountaintop from the Memphis sanitation worker strike. But I think you know one of the final lines of this speech.
I contemplated this afternoon. I have a difficult moment. I have a substrate in Vialla it will not be, because truth pressures will rise again. A long not long it cause no lie can near frail. A long not law alone. It calls you shall read what your soul A long way on the scaffold, long way up on the thing that's just that scaffold, sway the future behind the dim unknown standard, God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own.
A long not law of the moral.
Universe is long, but it ben towards the outside.
The art of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice. That's one of doctor King's more famous lines. And I think there's a reason I've only ever heard it out of context. Why I never really thought about it having been spoken on the afternoon of March twenty fifth, nineteen sixty five, from the steps of the Capitol Building in Montgomery, Alabama, flanked on either side by civil rights
activists with fresh bruises on their faces. When you neatly cut around those words and you lift them out of that speech, carving away the context of the bloody fifty four miles between Selma and Montgomery, you might think moral arcs just spend that way, that the natural shape of such an ark just tends to angle in the direction of justice, that if you wait patiently, that gentle curve will end, and there at its tip will be justice. But the moral arc of the universe doesn't bent.
It is bent.
It is pushed and pled and molded and hammered and kneaded, and it disgreased with our blood.
It doesn't bent.
We have to bend it. It is not enough to observe its shape. You have to throw your body against it. You have to look back at that long arc and remember who toiled and struggled and cried and bled before you. That arc bends because you were not the first person who wished that it did, because we are not the first generation to put our shoulder to it and push.
Viola Luzo knew that.
She was there that afternoon in Montgomery. She heard doctor King give that speech just a few hours before she died. Now, normally I would have at least skimmed most of the biographies that have been written about her. There are a couple books about her life, and I would try to sort of suss out the angle that each of the authors was approaching the story with and cross reference the details that didn't quite match with newspaper articles and interviews
with people who were there. That's my normal approach. Normally I work on an episode all week. As I said, I started this morning, so he didn't quite have time for the normal process. So forgive me if her life story is a little lighter on the details. What I did read, though, was the chapter on Viola written in a book by Reverend Jack Mendelssohn. He published a book of stories about civil rights martyrs in nineteen sixty six, so the interviews he had with people who knew Viola
were fresh. He was writing this just a few months after she died, And of course I also read Jay Edgar Hoover's frantic and furious memos as he cooked up his smear campaign against this dead mother. Yola was born in Pennsylvania nineteen twenty five, the daughter of a school teacher and a coal miner. Her father lost a hand in a mining accident during the Great Depression, so the family relied on income from short term teaching positions. Her
mother took anywhere she could find them. They moved often, but Viola spent much of her childhood in the South. At eighteen, she married a much older man, her boss at the restaurant where she worked. When they divorced six years later, she kept custody of their two daughters. In nineteen fifty one, she married Anthony Luzo, a business agent for Teamsters Local two forty seven, and the couple had
three more children together. After she died, those who wanted to minimize her death would say that she was mentally ill, she had a criminal record, she was a bad mother, she was crazy, and her interest in civil rights was a recent flight of fancy, perhaps a symptom of her
erratic mind. Now, I would argue that even someone with a criminal record and a mental illness can have a firmly held belief in the value of civil rights and make their own decision to participate in a political protest, and either way it certainly isn't a reason to kill them. But in Viola's case, I think the people repeating those things are being unfair on purpose. I think they know they're lying. Now, it is kind of true that she had a criminal record. She'd been cited for failing to
send three of her children to school. In nineteen sixty four, she kept them home for forty days to protest a school policy that allowed teenagers to drop out of school. Without parental permission. I don't fully understand the logic of the protest, but the cause makes perfect sense. She told the Detroit Board of Education that she regretted leaving school at fourteen, and she wished the law had kept her in school. She believed that requiring children to stay in
school until eighteen would protect them from being exploded. She was charged with violating the state school compulsory age law, the one she was protesting. Years later, her daughter Penny explained to author Mary Stanton that it wasn't some hysterical, unreasonable thing. It was a carefully considered, active protest. She was trying to get publicity and draw attention to what she thought was a dangerous law that would hurt children.
A few weeks after her arrest in June of nineteen sixty four, maybe in an effort to just blow off some steam, she took off on an impromptu road trip without telling her husband. This, coupled with the arrest, provided the pieces for the narrative that she was irrational and mentally disturbed. Newspapers seized on this line from an FBI memo about how she disappeared to Canada and her husband had to report her missing, but they lived in Michigan.
Canada is just kind of the next town over. It does appear that her interest in civil rights came on suddenly. She never brought it up before nineteen sixty four. But nineteen sixty four was as good a time as any for a housewife in Detroit to become interested in the civil rights movement. She didn't just wake up one day and drive to Selma. She had been involved in the Detroit chapter of the NAACP for a year leading up
to her death. Honestly, I think it might be more unusual for a white housewife in Michigan to be outspoken about segregation earlier than this.
It makes perfect sense that she.
Would develop an interest in the civil rights movement at the height of the civil rights movement. I don't understand why this is meant to be suspicious. It was bloody Sunday that finally spurred her to greater action. She was active locally, but the footage of the violence on the Edmund Pettis Bridge and March of nineteen sixty five was too much. Her husband recalls the tears streaming down her face when she saw it on the evening news. When
James Ree was murdered a few days later. She attended a memorial service for him at her local Unitarian church. Later that week, she marched with a few hundred students from Wayne State University to show their solidarity with the marchers in Selma. At that rally, she heard several students
who'd been down in Selma speak about their experiences. They described the way the deputies laughed and sneered at them on bloody Sunday, saying those cops were just like the men who murdered James Reeb, except they'd been deputized by the state to do it. After that march, she called her husband. She'd made up her mind and she was going to Selma. That's not unreasonable. That's not something you would only do if you were on drugs or in the grips of a serious psychiatric episode. It doesn't even
seem that surprising to me. She wasn't the only person who did this. She'd been interested in the civil rights movement for a year. She was involved with the NAACP and the Unitarian Church. She marched in Detroit in solidarity with Selma, and she heard the impassioned pleas for help from the people who'd been there. They wanted more people to go back down to Alabama with them to join the march to Montgomery. So she did, that's not crazy. I can see myself doing something like that. I think
a lot of us can. It's not your fight, her husband told her, but she disagreed. She told her family it's everyone's fight. Viola spent six days in Alabama, the last six days of her life. She got in touch with organizers at the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and they put her to work shuttling people back and forth between Selma and Montgomery. When the march began, Viola march too.
She walked across the Edmund Pettis Bridge, just two weeks after sobbing on the couch at home in Detroit watching the news of bloody Sunday. The night before the march reached Montgomery, Biola was volunteering with the medics at Saint Jude's Catholic Church just outside the city. She spent the evening gently dressing the bloody feet of marchers who'd walked barefoot on this pilgrimage. Father Timothy D. C offered her
one of the cots in the church basement. She said there were people who needed it more than she did, and she slept alone in her car. On the morning of March twenty fifth, she asked Father d C if there was anywhere she could go to get a good.
Look at where they were headed.
So he took her up to the church bell tower, and together they looked out over the landscape, and they could see the line of marchers already streaming from Saint Jude's heading out for the four mile walk to the capitol. Howl Dec says she got pale and anxious, and she turned to him and she said that suddenly she felt very sure that someone would die that day. But they
prayed together and that seemed to ease her fears. And as she walked away from Saint Jude's that morning, she slipped off her shoes so she could make the final leg of the march into Montgomery barefoot. That evening, she was back at Saint Jude's. Leroy Moten, a local actor of us she'd been working with all week, took her car from the church and drove back into Montgomery to pick up a group of marchers who needed a ride
back to Selma. Biola called her husband and her children every night during that trip, and this night was no different. One of her daughters later recalled hearing the sounds of celebration in the background when her mom called that last time, everybody was celebrating the march.
Had been successful.
She must have been calling from Saint Jude's. After the march was over, but before she got into her car for the last time, Biola told her husband she'd be leaving very soon, and she asked him to wire her fifty dollars for the trip home. On the way to Selma, in the car with Leroy Mowten, another car tailgated them aggressively. She'd been warned this was a possibility. There were white men driving around just looking for any car that had both black and white people in side, particularly cars with
a white woman and a black man. Viola seemed unbothered by the tailgating, though, and she joked with Leroy about how she'd like to come back to visit Alabama again one day if she didn't get killed. In the meantime, after they dropped off the first batch of passengers in Selma, Leroy and Viola took a break for dinner. They ate separately, but they were both back in Viola's car a little after seven pm, heading back to Montgomery to pick up
more people who needed rides to Selma. The car full of klansmen spotted them in a red light near the Edmund Pettis Bridge. It was clear almost immediately that they were being followed. FBI informant and klansman Gary Rowe claimed that she evaded them with surprising speed, getting her oldsmobile up to ninety miles an hour a few times. During
this twenty minute pursuit. Leroy Moten recalls that she hummed, we shall overcome as she concentrated on the road, speeding down the dark highway, trying desperately to make it back to Montgomery with this carful of white men in hot pursuit. Roe claims it was klansman Collie Wilkins who fired at Biola when they finally caught up to her. She was hit twice in the head. She was almost certainly already
dead when the car skidded into a ditch. Leroy Moten was injured in the crash, but he'd not been shot. He ran for three miles before he was picked up by another vehicle ferrying marchers back to Selma. All four klansmen from the car were arrested the very next day. It was hardly a mystery to the FBI who'd done it. Gary Rogue called Hiss FBI handler Liter that night.
And told him.
The two later met in a parking lot and the gun Roe gave his hand that night was never admitted into evidence. President Lyndon Johnson announced the arrest of Collie Wilkins, Gary Rowe, William Eaton, and Eugene Thomas on TV the very next day, but only three of them were charged. FBI informant Gary Rowe testified against the other three klansmen.
All three of those clansmen were charged with murder by the state courts in Alabama, and in a separate federal case, they were indicted on charges of conspiracy to interfere with civil rights. Those federal charges notably said nothing about murder. The murder charges were just in the state courts in Alabama, and a white jury in Alabama wouldn't convict a klansman. Eaton ultimately died of a heart attack before he faced trial, but Eugene Thomas was acquitted. Collie Wilkins, the man Row
accused of firing the fatal shot, was tried twice. The first time, the all white jury voted unanimously against convicting Wilkins of murder, but they were close to a conviction on manslaughter.
It was ten to two.
Newspaper reports say the two holdouts that saved Wilkins from prison told reporters that they just couldn't trust the testimony of a man like Gary Rowe, not because he was an admitted paid government informant, but because he was an oathbreaker. He'd broken the oath he took as a klansman and as klansmen themselves. That's something they took very seriously.
Wilkins got a hung jury the first.
Time around, and he was outright acquitted when they tried again. When it came time to testify against his friends in the federal trials, Roe was playing hard to get. I don't know what was going on in his head, but maybe he knew he had the FBI over a barrel here. With the state murder trials ending without convictions, the federal civil rights trial was the only way to lock anyone up for this murder. They had put an FBI informant on the stand to testify that he was there when
it happened. So it would be awfully shameful if everybody walked.
In November of.
Nineteen sixty five, a series of increasingly frantic FBI memos sent directly to j Edgar Hoover outlined the problem. Gary Rowe wanted more money, a lot of it. He wanted thousands of dollars of debt paid off, unpaid alimony to his wife, overdue power bills, months of delinquent rent on his apartment, a few thousand for a failed business venture. Pretty typical kinds of debts. But three grand and unpaid bills in nineteen sixty five is more like thirty thousand
dollars today. Roe was in deep but when they put him on the stand, they would have to admit that he was a paid informant, which makes the records of any payments made to him for that work relevant evidence that they would have to produce. And it wouldn't look great if they paid him thousands of dollars right before a trial. And he didn't just want money. He wanted a new life. He wanted to be relocated with his family.
He wanted the government to promise him not only that he'd never be prosecuted for anything ever, but they'd never make him testify again about anything.
Never.
As the trial date approached, the memos got weirder. In late November, his handler described him as highly emotional, distraught, and tearful during a meeting. He'd previously agreed to testify, but now he's trying to back out, saying he felt let down by the FBI and he no longer trusts his handler. He alternated between saying that maybe they wouldn't even want him to testify because he couldn't guarantee that what he was going to say would be helpful, almost
implying that he planned to lie. And then he said he just wouldn't go, that they'd have to subpoena him, and even then they'd have to use physical force if they wanted to get him back into a courtroom in Alabama.
And then he started bargaining again.
If the government could make him a series of promises, he'd do it, but they had to promise that he would never have to testify again, not about anything, not ever, and he wanted a massive severance. He wanted his entire family relocated, including his elderly parents, which would mean that his father would have to be financially compensated for the
loss of employment that relocation would cause. Had It went on and on, and some of them were pretty absurd, But one thing he wouldn't budge on was he wanted a job. Specifically, he demanded that the FBI get him a job as a Border Patrol agent. In the end, he got almost everything he asked for. After the three clansmen were convicted on the federal civil rights charge, the FBI paid Gary row ten thousand dollars, the equivalent of over one hundred thousand dollars to day. He was given
a new identity and a job. He didn't quite get his dream job with the Border Patrol, but he worked for some time.
As a U. S Marshal.
A decade later, when Wilkins and Thomas were finally out of prison, they went on a national news program to accuse Gary Rowe of being the real trigger man. They both passed polygraph exams or whatever that's worth to you, and additional witnesses came forward, including two policemen who testified before a grand jury that Roe had bragged about being the one to kill Liuzou. The prosecution was halted by
a federal injunction. He'd been granted immunity. It didn't matter how many witnesses came forward and gave sworn testimony that they knew for a fact that he was the killer, that they saw him do it, that there was evidence that he'd done it, that he admitted to them that he'd done it, that he bragged about it.
It didn't matter.
The FBI had given him complete and total immunity in exchange for the testimony he gave that put three other men in prison for a murder that he at the very least participated in. The gun he gave his FBI handler the night of the murder was never examined as evidence, and the FBI had every reason to cover up the possibility that they'd paid thousands of dollars to a murderer. It wouldn't be the first time they'd done it or
the last. So to distract from the involvement of a federal informant with a documented history of violence, the FBI dragged the.
Victim through the mud.
They played up her arest record and called her a terrible mother. They drew up an FBI memo claiming that an examination of the body revealed needle marks on her arms, and then they intentionally leaked the fake memo to the press, never mind that the actual autopsy report made no such finding and there were no drugs in her system. Her husband and children were harassed, a cross was burned in their yard in Detroit the week of her funeral, and
they reported receiving obscene phone calls for months. If Hoover had his way, Biola Luzo would not be memorialized as a loving mother who felt moved to fight for civil rights. She'd be shamed as a lunatic who abandoned her children, shot up heroin, and had adulterous inner racial sex, and then was quickly forgotten. The clan killed Biola Luzo, but the FBI tried to kill her memory. And it's really
the same as it ever was. As I'm writing this, I just saw New York Times headline from today, Monday, January twelfth, twenty twenty six. FBI inquiry into Ice shooting is examining victims possible ties to activist groups. They're investigating the victim because they already know everything they need to know about the killer.
He's on their payroll. If you've been to a.
Protest anytime in the last fifty years or so you've heard this chant.
Think cop, thinkin non im, thinkin hend then hard.
I think plank no man. Cops and clan go hand in hand. The earliest mention of that exact phrase being used as a protest chant that I could find was in a newspaper article from nineteen seventy six. But I really only spend a few minutes looking, and I'm certain it predates the late seventies. I'm sure it was something Black Southerners said quietly to one another for a long time before it was ever chanted at a protest.
But what does it mean.
I've heard it chanted at local cops, sheriff's deputies, state police, National guardsmen. I've heard it at clan rallies and school board meetings. I've shouted at myself with lips that burned with the taste of pepper spray.
But what does it mean?
I never really gave it a lot of thought. It's just one of those things that makes perfect sense to me and doesn't merit further consideration. But it could mean a lot of things.
Maybe it's just an.
Abbreviated way of expressing that law enforcement and organized white supremacist groups that engage in extra judicial violence exist along a spectrum of racial violence, meeting out that violence on subjugated groups with varying degrees of legitimacy and public approval.
Or maybe it's meant to be commentary on the historical evolution of modern policing and the way that it grew out of Antebellum slave patrols, thus quite literally positioning cops as the modern successor to groups of violent racist vigilantes. I've been an actual clan rallies where it seems to be a cry of frustration that the police are clearly serving and protecting the interests of the actual clan at the expense of the community, and in ways that result
in violence towards those who oppose the clan. Or maybe it's even further removed from the words themselves. Maybe it's a metonomy where cops refers to the state in general, and clan is any sort of extra judicial enforcement mechanism of the darker whims of that state. That's probably broad enough to hold all possible meanings. Maybe it's all of those things or none of them, but it doesn't actually matter because it's literal. It's not a metaphor, it's not hyperbole.
It's not taking liberties. It's not a joke. It is the literal, factual, historical truth. Cops and clan do indeed go hand in hand. When Caesar cow said, James Waller, William Evan Simpson, Sandra Nilie Smith, and Michael Nathan were gunned down in the streets of Greensboro, North Carolina, there was a police informant in the car with the klansmen and the Nazis who shot them, And there was a police informant at the clan meetings where their murders were planned.
When Yola Luza was shot in the head in Selma, Alabama, there was an FBI informant in the car with the clansmen who killed her. When the Birmingham police found out the Freedom Riders were coming in nineteen sixty one, they conspired with the clan to attack buses full of civil rights activists. Bull Connor told the clan they had fifteen minutes of free reign. A police captain told the clansmen on the FBI's payroll, you can beat them, bomb them, Maimon kill I don't give a shit.
There will be absolutely no arrests.
And the FBI knew, and the FBI didn't stop it. They didn't warn anyone about what was coming. When the mob of klansmen firebombed those buses and beat the fleeing passengers with pipes and bats and chains, it was the FBI informant himself leading the mob. When Michael Schwerner, James Cheney, Andrew Goodman were killed in Nishaba County, Mississippi, it was a lynching coordinated and planned by local police who discussed the plan not at their police station, but at their
clan meetings. When the clansmen who murdered four little girls in a church basement in Birmingham was finally prosecuted, he went to his grave insisting that he'd only purchased that dynamite and it was his friend, the FBI informant, who placed it beneath the steps at the sixteenth Street Baptist Church, killing Addie May Collin, Cynthia Wesley, Carroll Robertson, and Carroll
to niece McNair. He was never made to answer for that accusation, but he was the same FBI informant who later admitted to murdering a black man whose name he couldn't even remember. When klansmen rioted in Myrtle Beach in nineteen fifty, and one of their own was killed by friendly fire as that crowd of masked races fired hundreds of bullets into a black owned bar. They took their fallen brother to the hospital, and when they stripped the white robe off his dead body, he was still wearing
his policeman's uniform underneath. For decades, the federal government paid klansmen to do their dirty work. They've used klansmen and neo Nazis and right wing extremists of all stripes to disrupt progressive movements. They've ignored credible intelligence about murders and bombings they could have stopped, and they looked the other way when their informants participated in violence against people they
thought posed a greater threat to the status quo. And they've always thought liberty, equality, freedom, tolerance, diversity, and civil rights were far more threatening than bombs in church basements and lynchings on dark, abandoned highways.
The comps the clan have.
Always worked hand in hand to share the burden of violently enforcing white supremacy, whether the klansman's FBI checks or off the books, or the fascist foot soldier is getting a W two from DHS. The violence is the same, the goal is the same. They're doing what they've always done, and so will we. I don't know exactly how long this moral arc of the universe is, but never forget you aren't the first to throw your shoulder into it, determined to see it bent towards justice.
Read Little Guys as a production of Cool Zone Media and iHeartRadio. It's researched, written and recorded by me Molly Conger. Our executive producers are Sophie Lichterman and Robert Evans. The show is at a by the wildly talented Rory Gagan. The theme music was composed by Brad Dickert.
You can email me at Weird Little Guys podcast at gmail dot com. I will definitely read it, but I probably won't answer.
It's nothing personal.
You can exchange conspiracy theories about the show with other listeners on the Weird Little Guys Subreddy. Just don't post anything that's going to make you one of my Weird Little Guys.