Given the fact that it was the FBI's own undercover agent riding along with the Klansmen who allegedly pulled the trigger that fateful night and that many of the investigators' findings regarding the case seem questionable at best, is Tommy justified in his anti-government paranoia? It is this question that haunts not only Tommy throughout his life but the audience throughout the movie. As to her children, one of them - her oldest son - has since become a recluse living in the backwoods of Alabama, while her other son, Tommy, has become a leader of the Michigan militia, eventually being forced to go underground himself after 9/11 and the implementation of the Patriot Act. It was her murder that inspired President Johnson to sign into law the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which essentially ended the use of poll taxes and literacy tests for voting in this country. The movie shows the rippling effect Viola's death had not only on society as a whole but on the lives of her children as well. The most eye-opening aspect of the film involves the way in which after her death, Liuzzo became the object of greater government scrutiny than even the men who perpetrated the crime. Through both memories and documented evidence, the movie paints the portrait of an inspiring woman who recoiled at the injustices she saw in the world around her and ended up paying the ultimate price for her consuming need to rectify them. In form and style, this is a fairly conventional documentary, combining footage from the past with present-day interviews with friends and family members of the victim. Instead, she headed to the South to lend her services as a nurse for the civil rights march in Selma, Alabama on March 7, 1965, a day that came to be known as "Black Sunday." For on that day, Liuzzo was gunned down while driving along a deserted road by four members of the Ku Klux Klan. A white woman who was an activist long before it became fashionable to be one, Liuzzo could have chosen to live her life in quiet anonymity, safely ensconced with her husband and five children in their middle class home in Detroit. or Medgar Evers, Viola Liuzzo earned her place in American history by becoming a martyr to the cause of civil rights. Although nowhere near as well known as Martin Luther King Jr.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |