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On the night of March 25, 1965, just hours after thousands of marchers reached Montgomery at the end of the Selma to Montgomery march, a white Detroit mother named Viola Luizo was shot and killed by the Ku Klux Klan on Highway 80. She had been ferrying exhausted volunteers back to Selma, doing the quiet, necessary work that keeps a movement alive. Her murder happened at the height of one of the most explosive chapters of the civil rights movement in a season defined by Bloody Sunday, by voter suppression so brutal it shocked the nation, and by a federal government finally being forced to confront the open violence of the Jim Crow South. Louisa's killing was backlash, white supremacist retaliation against a multiracial movement demanding the most basic promise of democracy, the right to vote. And it was murder carried out in a landscape where intimidation, beatings, bombings and murder were tools used to maintain racial hierarchy. What followed exposed the deep fractures of the era State courts that refused to convict her killers, a federal government forced to revive Reconstruction era laws to do what Alabama would not, and an FBI willing to smear Louiso's names to protect state self from scrutiny. Sound familiar? Her death became a turning point in federal civil rights enforcement and a window into the cost borne by ordinary people who step into extraordinary danger. Today we're unpacking the full story of Selma, the murder of Viola Luizo, and the investigation that followed the long fight for truth that continues even today on Flipping Tables. Hello and welcome back. We are solidly in the new year now as of this recording. I know that this year has been long already and we're two weeks in. Just a couple announcements today before we jump in. Just a reminder that if you want bonus content, you want these episodes ad free. You can always subscribe to patreon.com Monty Mater. We do have some changes upcoming, so I also have the highway to Hell podcast, which is now being released on Tuesdays. We moved flipping tables up to Mondays just because it made the posting and recording schedule a lot easier. Highway to Hell is going to have a separate Patreon. It's going to be highway to Hell podcast on Patreon. And we're just going to do strictly. If you want a place to get away and you just want your true crime and your horror and the fun stuff over there, we're going to move everything separately. We're resuming the Bible studies starting. Actually the first one is today, but we will also be doing one on the 28th as a reminder. These are not conversion studies. This is just talking about history. What does it actually say, and having a lot of conversations, especially because the Bible is so often used to talk about, you know, either restrict people's movements, restrict people's lives, or to, you know, be used politically. And I like to talk about that and give people an opportunity to kind of make their own minds up instead of being told what to believe. And I do hope that as we go through today and as we go through the rest of this year, just be mindful of, you know, what we're taking in, taking little breaks when we need them, especially from online, digital sources. The social media especially can be such a powerful tool. It can also really be problematic and it can be really overwhelming. So I'm doing my best to try to create spaces that you can get away to spaces that you feel like you can come relax, you can come listen, you can come learn, or you can come chat on Patreon. We're doing pop ups and we're also doing chats where I just pop in and just say, hey, how's everybody doing? How can I help what's moving? And so far it's been really great. Community is going to be progressively more important this year, I think, as things continue to heat up again. It has been a long year these last two weeks, but we're going to jump right in. Starting with the long road. Road to what led to Selma. The march towards Selma did not begin in 1965. It began in the ashes of reconstruction, in the noose of lynching trees and the cramped classrooms of segregated schools. It whispered instructions from black parents to their children about how to survive in a racist society and in the relentless determination of black Americans who refused to surrender their humanity. Selma was a breaking point, but the forces that led to it were decades old, rooted in a system that was sustained by law, custom, tradition and terror. And unfortunately, often backed by religion. At the turn of the 20th century, the Jim Crow south stood as the most comprehensive racial apartheid system outside of colonial Africa. With the blessing of the Supreme Court's decision in Plessy vs Ferguson in 1896, segregation became law in nearly every aspect of life. Schools, hospitals, buses, restaurants, housing, and of course, the ballot box. Remember that a lot of these things have been legal in the past. The Holocaust was legal. Segregation was legal. Slavery was legal. Just because it's illegal legal doesn't make it right. Black Americans were not merely separated. They were systematically deprived of political power. Literacy tests, poll taxes, grandfather clauses, and outright intimidation made voting nearly impossible. In many areas, justice was a fiction. Police, judges and politicians upheld the system rather than Restraining it, especially in the south, Lynchings became the enforcement arm of white supremacy. Between 1880 and 1940, thousands of black Americans were lynched in atrocities often treated as community events. Crowds would pose for photographs. Besides mutilating bodies, newspapers advertised upcoming killings. These lynchings were more than murders. They were warnings to every black person that don't you dare aspire to equality. Don't you dare step out of line if you do, quote, haven't you learned by what we did to the last one? End quote. Despite this, resistance sprang up through the work of extraordinary individuals like Ida B. Wells, whose fearless reporting laid bare the truth behind the violence. And organizations like the NAACP, founded in 1909 to fight for civil rights through the courts and the press. World War II shifted the hundreds of thousands of black soldiers fought fascism abroad, only to return home to segregation. Their service intensified the hypocrisy at the heart of American democracy. Black veterans refused to return quietly to second class citizenship, banned from many VA benefits. And they became the backbone of the emerging civil rights movement. In 1948, President Truman ordered the desegregation of the military, A symbolic but important step that signaled federal acknowledgment of racial injustice. The next major shock came in 1954 with Brown versus the Board of education, which declared that segregated schools were unconstitutional. White evangelical southern politicians responded with fury. Quote, massive resistance campaigns formed to resist integration by any means necessary. States passed laws closing public schools rather than integrate them. Of course, segregation academies opened under Christian monikers. White citizen councils, sometimes called the uptown klan, organized boycotts, firings, bank foreclosures and intimidation campaigns against black families and white supporters. It was a coordinated, political and deeply violent effort to crush equality before it began. Southern churches also participated with fury to prevent integration. Sermons rained down from the pulpits and pastors became integral fixtures to local and federal lawmakers. But change had already been kindled in Montgomery. On December 1st of 1955, Rosa Parks refused to surrender her bus seat to a white passenger. Her arrest ignited Montgomery Bus Boycott, a 381 campaign that altered the course of history. It wasn't just parks or Martin Luther King Jr. Who made it possible. It was the cooks, the maids, the teachers, the parents, the students, the pastors who refused to ride segregated buses for more than a year. This is resistance day in, day out, no matter the cost. Peacefully showing up and simply refusing. These people walked miles, miles to work. They endured threats, bombings, police harassment. King's home was attacked. Volunteers were jailed. Yet the boycott held, proving that non violent mass mob could expose the Cruelty of Jim Crow to the world. In 1957, King and fellow ministers formed the southern Christian leadership conference, or the sclc, to carry the movement beyond Montgomery. But the next revolution wouldn't come from the clergy. It would come from students. In February of 1964, black college students in Greensboro, North Carolina, sat at a segregated woolworths lunch counter and refused to leave. Their quiet courage spread through the south like wildfire. Sit ins erupted across 13 states, led by students who believed dignity was worth risking arrest, beatings, or expulsion. These students formed the student nonviolent coordinating committee, a fiercely brave, grassroots, youth led organization guided by veterans like Ella Baker. The sncc organizers such as John Lewis, Diane nesh, Bob Moses, and Charles Sherrod became some of the most fearless activists of the era, venturing into the most hostile counties in the south where the movement's presence almost guaranteed arrest or assault. Let this be a testimony to all of us that we can all do something. We can all, in our own ways, refuse to give in. And sometimes I think we think that resistance or revolution has to be these grand gestures. Sometimes it's sitting at a counter and saying, no, I'm not going to leave. The freedom riders of 1961 tested the limits of nonviolent courage even further. Integrated groups of riders boarded interstate buses to challenge segregation at terminals. In Alabama and Mississippi, the backlash was explosive. In anniston, alabama, a mob firebombed a greyhound bus and beat the riders as they escaped the flames. And Birmingham police commissioner Bull connor allowed Klan members, some of them who were wearing badges they'd been deput to attack riders with pipes and clubs. Dozens of people were hospitalized. Among the attackers in Birmingham was Gary Thomas Rowe, a Klan member and an FBI informant whose violent participation exposed how deeply the Klan had penetrated local law enforcement. And it foreshadowed the compromised role he would later play in Selma. That same year, the sncc went deeper into the rural south, especially Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia. They encountered levels of danger that, until recently, few Americans today can imagine. We're seeing some of that now. You know, we're. I've definitely had a few conversations with people who were active in the civil rights movement, making comparisons to what we've seen recently. Organizers were beaten, shot at, jailed, and stocked. Local black families who opened their doors to them risked losing jobs, homes, or their lives. But the work continued, building a foundation for what came next. Birmingham in 1963, under Bull Connor, Birmingham was a fortress of segregation and brutality. When the SCLC launched project c, the c stood for confront the city Responded with shocking violence. Connor ordered police to set dogs on children, blasted school age protesters with fire hoses powerful enough to tear their skin off. Images of young people hurled across sidewalks, Pinned against buildings by water cannons, Stunned the nation. Some of the most powerful photos of the civil rights movement came from this moment. But the darkest day came on September 15, 1963, when white supremacists bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church, killing four black girls. Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Denise McNair and Carol Robertson. The blast was so powerful, it collapsed staircases, it shattered families, and it revealed unmistakably that the defense of segregation relied on the murder of children and violence. Tragedy continued into 1964 with the freedom summer, A massive voting rights initiative in Mississippi. Black citizens had been virtually excluded from political process for decades, and activists aimed to register voters, run freedom schools and challenge the all white controlled politic. The response from white supremacists was swift and coordinated. They have always been swift and coordinated. Dozens of black churches were burned. Homes were firebombed. Volunteers were beaten, arrested or disappeared entirely. On June 21st of 1964, SNCC activists James Cheney, along with white volunteers Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwemmer were abducted and murdered by the klan with assistance from the Neshoba county sheriff's office. Their bodies were found buried under an earthen dam. The killing shocked the country, but did not stop the movement. Leaders like Fannie Lou hamer, whose testimony later that year at the democratic national convention seared itself into American memory, Exposed the viciousness of Mississippi's political system and the cost of demanding democracy. By 1965, the struggle for voting rights moved to Alabama, Specifically to Dallas county, where Selma had become the epicenter of black disenfranchisement. Although black citizens made up a majority of the population, only about 1% were registered to vote. Sheriff Jim Clark openly allied with segregationists, Enforced discrimination through violence, Arbitrary arrests and intimidation. Activists from the sncc, especially Amelia Boyton, Mary Foster, Sorry, Marie Foster, James Foreman and John Lewis, had spent years working in Selma, Often facing harassment, jailings and constant threats. But progress was excruciatingly slow. Everything changed when on February 18, 1965, state troopers attacked a nighttime march in nearby Marion. Jimmy Lee Jackson, a 26 year old black activist, was shot as he tried to protect his mother and grandfather from police. He died days later from his injuries. His death shattered the community and became the catalyst for something bigger. Movement leaders decided to to march from Selma to Montgomery to present their demands directly to Governor George Wallace and force federal intervention on March 7th of 1965, 600 marchers, black and white, old and young, set out across Edmund Pettus Bridge. Awaiting them on the other side were state troopers and Clark's mounted posse. Without warning, the troopers advanced, swinging clubs wrapped in barbed wire, firing tear gas, trampling marches under their horses and fracturing skulls. The brutality of Bloody Sunday was broadcast on national television. Americans watching from their living rooms saw what black Southerners had known for generations, that the fight for the right to vote was a fight for survival. Blood pooled on the pavement. Bodies laid scattered. John Lewis was carried away with a fractured skull. Clergy and doctors poured into Alabama. Thousands answered the call to stand with Selma. Among them was a white woman from Detroit named Viola Luizo, who watched the news and knew she couldn't stay home. The road to Selma was paved with courage and with loss, with death and tragedy, with state and federal sanctioned violence. Because segregation was legal, disenfranchisement and discrimination were legal. These were the law enforcement. And to the people who say, well, they should have just listened to law enforcement, they should have just complied. Sometimes compliance is doing the wrong thing when it comes to discrimination and ripping democracy from people at the risk of state violence. Compliance is the wrong answer, because many of these things were legal, and it doesn't make them right. Just because discrimination is legal doesn't mean that it's right. It was shaped by the refusal of black communities to accept second class status and by the willingness of young activists, especially teens in early 20s, to face beatings, jail, firebombs and assassination. And it was made necessary by white supremacist violence so unrelenting that it took the deaths of children, teenagers, pastors, students, and ordinary people to force the nation to confront the lie of its own democracy. Selma was not the beginning of the movement. It was the moment when the weight of history could no longer be carried out quietly. It was where a century of struggle converged together and where people from around the country felt compelled to walk into danger because they could no longer stay silent in the face of injustice and because doing nothing had finally become intolerable. The murder of Viola Luizo cannot be understood as an isolated act of white supremacist violence. It has to be understood in the context of not just the civil rights, but that it was the culmination of. Of a century of organized racial repression in Alabama. The immediate backlash of the Selma voting rights campaign, and the product of a political climate in which the Ku Klux Klan, local law enforcement, and segments of state and federal government operated as overlapping Mutually reinforcing structures. To understand her death and its significance, we have to begin with the night she was shot, but also with the machinery of disenfranchisement that made Selma a battleground in 1965 in the first place. By the early 1960s, again, Dallas County, Alabama, represented the sharpest possible contradiction between what America claimed were its democratic principles and what was lived reality. And we have to understand, even with today, all of this has always been going on. It was going on in the south long before people saw pictures and saw televised action in Alabama, in Selma, at bloody Sunday. And it happened long before. We're seeing Instagram reels of what's happening in real time. It's just that now we're catching it on tape. Now we're seeing it live and with social media. We're seeing it more rapidly and quickly and with more volume than we've ever seen before. Dallas county was majority black, but only a tiny portion of its black residents were registered to vote. The barriers that were put in place were not accidental. They were engineered with precision by white supremacists of the region. They included literacy tests, poll taxes, voucher systems requiring white approval for you to be able to vote, arbitrary, quote, character assessments, and the ever present threat of violence that formed a lattice work designed to keep black political power non existence. Alabama basically said, yeah, this may be legal for you to vote now, but we're not going to let you. And the state had gotten away with it. Alabama's elected officials defended this system openly. Many law enforcement officers, as well as religious leaders enforced it zealously. Local civil rights activism had begun long before this happened. The Dallas county voters league, a small but determined group of black teachers, barbers, business owners and clergy, had pushed against the wall of disenfranchisement long before a national organization arrived, Long before the march or bloody Sunday ever happened. They were met with intimidation, arrests, job loss, home bombings, and constant surveillance. But they continued to persist. And it was into this landscape that the southern Christian leadership conference under Martin Luther King entered in 1964, seeking to make voting rights a national moral crisis, seeking to bring attention to it, to force Americans, specifically white Americans, to look at this and say, you cannot pretend you don't know. The escalation was not instantaneous, but it gradually built through late 1964 and early 1965. The movement in Selma was not simply a protest, but it was a confrontation between two Convening vision, competing visions of what America is. One was rooted in birthright democracy and equal citizenship. The other was rooted in white supremacy inherited racial hierarchy maintained by fores and violence. When activists attempted to register voters at a courthouse, they were met with cattle prods, beatings and arrests. Sheriff Jim Clark, with his brutal reputation and his infamous posse, became both a symbol and an enforcer of the system. His badge, his nightstick and his confederate flag emblem he sometimes wore in his lapel served as the declaration of his intent. The breaking point came In February of 1965 with the killing of Jimmy Lee Jackson, the 26 year old black activist we mentioned earlier, who was shot by an alabama state trooper, James bernard Fowler, while trying to protect his mother and grandfather. A night march in Marion. Jackson's death did not merely inflame the movement, it clarified its trajectory. His murder exposed in a single act the legal, lethal nature of resistance to black political participation. It convinced many that the only direct challenge. It convinced many that only a direct challenge to the state itself, something that was highly visible, federally scrutinized action, could break the stalemate. The idea of a march from Selma to Montgomery took shape in the days that followed. It was a bold strategy to walk 54 miles from the local symbol of disenfranchisement to the heart of Alabama's political power. It would test not only the state, but the federal government's willingness to intervene. When marchers attempted this. On March 7th of 1965, Bloody Sunday, they faced a brutal assault by state troopers at the Edmund pettus bridge. The images broadcast across a nation and shocked millions. Men on horseback charged into peaceful marchers. Deputies attacked unarmed citizens with clubs wrapped in barbed wire. Clouds of tear gas engulfed the crowds as television camera rolled and Americans watched its own citizens treated like enemy combatants, Domestic terrorists for attempting to exercise their constitutional rights. These events did more than galvanize public support. They transformed Selma into a national crisis. They also set the stage for the arrival of thousands of volunteers, clergy, medical personnel and supporters from across the country. Again, that's how Viola Luiza from Detroit ended up driving down to Selma. Now, Viola did not fit the archetype of the era's white female domestic ideal. She was a mother of five, a college student at Wayne state university university, and a member of the unitarian universalist church. A woman who believed deeply in moral logic of the civil rights movement. Her childhood experiences in the segregated south and her later life in the racially tense Detroit shaped her understanding of injustice. Friends described her as bold, stubborn and unwilling to bow to convention. She had been following the civil rights movement for years. Selma turned her concern into action when Martin Luther King Jr. Issued a call for supporters to come to Alabama. After Bloody Sunday, Louisa left Detroit and began the long drive south. This choice was not impulsive. It was intentional, grounded in her belief that the moral responsibility is not passive, that if she truly believed in civil rights, if she truly believed in equality, it required her action. In the days that followed, she worked as a volunteer driver, shuttling participants between Selma and Montgomery during the final federally protected march in March. Beginning on March 21, she transported supplies, helped at first aid stations, and assisted in logistical tasks that kept a mass movement functioning. Her role was not glamorous, but it was essential. And again, for people that are participating in protests, you're like, I don't know what I can do. I don't know how I can support. There are so many things that have to happen for a movement to be running, and sometimes that means passing out bottles of water. The march itself unfolded after unprecedented federal protection. After a court federally cleared the way thousands set off from Selma. The imagery from that march, the American flag, the interlocked arms of black and white marchers, clergies from dozens of denominations walking with local activists became iconic. You've probably seen the pictures and the footage of. By the time the marchers reached Montgomery on March 25, the crowd had grown to approximately 25,000 people. I can't wait to see a march like that this year. King's speech at the state capitol declared that the arc of the moral universe was long, but it bends towards justice. It was a powerful, defiant declaration. But as the day faded and volunteers began the work of returning people to Selma, the danger on the highways remained acute. For white supremacists and members of the Ku Klux Klan, the sight of white northerners supporting a black led movement was intolerable. In their view, these white allies were, quote, race traitors, undermining the social order and in many of their minds, the God given order. The Klan's presence in Alabama during the Selma campaign was not abstract. It was organized, armed and mobilized. Its members included law enforcement officers, state employees, ordinary citizens who viewed the movement as a threat to their cultural, political, religious and racial dominance. The night of March 25, 1965, was thick with this hostility. The march was over, but the backlash had just begun, and white supremacist groups began to prowl the highway. Late that evening, Viola Louisa was driving back toward Montgomery with Leroy Moten, a young black activist that she had met during the march. Together, they traveled along U.S. route 80, the same highway that thousands of marchers had walked during the preceding days. The two were transporting Volunteers and supplies. Routine work, but dangerous work. Their car, a 1963 Oldsmobile, stood out on the dark highway. Not far behind them, a car carrying four Klansmen began to follow. The men were colleague Leroy Wilkins Jr. A young committed member of the United Klans of America. America William Eaton, Eugene Thomas, a man and a man whose presence would complicate the case for decades. Gary Thomas Rowe Roe wasn't just a Klansman. He was also a paid FBI informant. He had participated in Klan violence before, including the attack on the Freedom Riders in Birmingham of 1961. His role in the car that pursued Luizo was a tangle of allegiance, infiltration and moral ambiguity. According to later testimony and investigative files, the Klansmen noticed Luizo's car because it contained a white woman and a black man driving together at night. In the racial code of the Jim Crow south, this was an unforgivable transgression. They had a very big hang up with white women being with black men. The very, very big no, no for them. The men decided to chase them down. As the two cars sped along the highway, the Klansmen pulled alongside. Shots were fired into Luizo's vehicle. Viola Louisa was struck twice in the face and killed instantly. Moton, covered in her blood, survived only by lying motionless and pretending to be dead until the attackers left. This was clearly not a subtle killing, it was a message. It was a calculated act of racial terror. Mean not only to punish Louiso, but also to send a message to the movement. White allies would not be spared. We don't care if you're white, if you help black people. If you're driving in the car as a woman with a black man, we will kill you too. Obey. Comply or this is what will happen to you. Within hours, local authorities found the bullet riddled car crashed off the side of the road. The attack had the characteristics of a classic Klan violence. Planned, opportunistic and rooted in the desire to enforce racial boundaries. But this crime had a complicating factor. Because Roe was in the car, the FBI knew more. The FBI knew about it and it knew it faster than the public realized. President Lyndon B. Johnson announced the arrest the very next day on national television, which was an extraordinary move for a sitting president. He condemned the Klan and praised law enforcement for swift action. But what he did not say was equally important. That the FBI had an informant present in the murder vehicle. Someone whose decades long relationship with the Bureau would soon raise a profound moral and legal question. The state of Alabama moved quickly to prosecute the killers for murder. But the trials unfolded along predictable lines. In the Deep south, white juries were reluctant to convict white men who had killed a civil rights worker, particularly one they viewed as a race mixing outsider from the North. The state held two trials. The first ended in a hung jury. Can you imagine like drive by shooting, kill a car, open murder, no question, hung jury. The second ended in an equation. For many in the south, the message was clear. The killing of a civil rights worker, even a white one, would not necessarily lead to state level convictions. If you are defending the cause and defending what we believe on and and defending what law enforcement is supporting, you can get away with murder. The failure set the stage for prosecution that would redefine civil rights law in the United States. But before, before we move on into how the federal government intervened when the state failed to pursue justice, we're going to take our first of two mid show sponsor breaks. Remember that you can subscribe@patreon.com montema $4 a month if you want Podcast ad free bonus content and notes from me. This episode is brought to you by Ground News. With everything going on in the United States, it's sometimes hard to keep track of things globally. The protests in Iran, what's going on in Venezuela, and the rise of authoritarianism globally. Yesterday, the Ugandan government shut down the Internet just two days before the parliamentary and presidential elections are supposed to take place. The Ugandan Communications Commission ordered Internet Internet to be stopped, taking the step stating it was necessary to prevent misinformation and the incitement of violence. Iran did the same thing in the wake of their protests to prevent organizing and prevent access to communications of protesters as well as information being sent out to the outside world. In Uganda, all non essential Internet traffic is now prohibited prior to the election, which happens tomorrow. As of this recording, in the wake of Uganda's President Yower Musevini, A81, who is seeking his seventh term after ruling the country since 1986. Stories like these are so important, it's something that until recently we hadn't really considered. What happens if your country shuts down the Internet to prevent you from accessing information or for organizing organizing a protest or to prevent you from getting access to information you might need. What if they use it to sway or manipulate elections? And the only reason that I saw this story was because I go every day to Ground News and I look at the breaking news page and then I look at my for you page where I customize based on stories I want to follow that I don't want to get lost in the deluge of news broadcasts every day. But the breaking news helps me find stories like this that I might have otherwise missed. It's really important that we stay informed. One of my greatest fears right now is the rise of authoritarianism and far right, especially misogynistic ideologies that are arising not just in places like the Middle east and in Africa, but also in Europe as well. And I know that being informed right now can be really overwhelming. But ground news makes it easier to take in the information you need and be able to put the phone down and walk away and make those decisions with your life without being caught up in an algorithm. The danger of getting news from social media, as someone who talks about the news on social media, is that algorithms don't care about truth, they care about engagement and they are not regulated. So it is really important to always have an external news source off of social media that you can fact check with that you can also use to get news without being caught into an algorithm, doom scrolling, overwhelm film, or not being able to verify information. And if you would like to be able to use ground news, you can subscribe to ground news for 40 off. Their vantage plan comes out to about $5 a month at groundnews.com tables. The collapse of Alabama's murder prosecutions following Viola Luizo's killing was not surprising. It followed a long established pattern that had been held across the deep south when white men killed civil rights activists or black people. Whether in Selma, Birmingham, Jackson, Macomb or anywhere else, State courts rarely delivered convictions. All white juries, heavily prejudiced local sympathies with law enforcement that were enforcing these racial. Racial prejudices and overt hostility to the movement created a judicial environment where racial terror faced virtually no legal consequences. Again, remember, this was legal. This was the norm. This was what law enforcement was pushing. Why don't you just stay in line? Why would you dare ask for more rights? Why don't you just go along to get along? For Federal officials in 1965, this was not an abstraction, but a chronic crisis crisis that spanned decades. The Luiso case simply made it impossible to ignore. And it's one of the many instances where it often takes the death of a prominent person or a white person, or an innocent person or a child for people to really start to pay attention, to believe, especially black and brown activists and protesters, and to understand what these movements really represent. It often takes a violent, open murder. Harder for people to wake up and realize, oh, this is serious. I can no longer Be an active. I can no longer be passive. The justice department civil rights division, only recently strengthened by the civil Rights act of 1964, understood from the outset that Alabama could not be trusted to deliver justice. Yet the federal government could not retry the men for murder. Homicide was a state crime. The question facing federal prosecutors was whether there existed a legal pathway, any pathway that could hold the Louiso killers accountable in a court that was not structurally rigged against just justice, especially for black people. The answer lay buried in a reconstruction era statute written nearly a century earlier, during a period when the federal government had attempted to dismantle the first Ku Klux Klan. This law, codified in 18 USC 41, 241, made it a federal crime for two or more persons to conspire to deprive an individual of rights guaranteed by the constitution or federal law. Though originally designed to combat racial terrorism in the post civil war south, the statue had been largely dormant for decades. Decades. Its language was broad, even vague, but its potential was enormous. If prosecutors could argue that the conspiracy to kill Louiso was also a conspiracy to deprive others of civil rights. And, and the civil rights department of the justice system of the Department of Justice is so important. And over the course of last year, we saw the civil rights act and the civil rights voting act really be progressively weakened. However, the department of justice still has this civil rights division. And as of yesterday, so this is being Filmed on the 14th, as of yesterday, January 13th of 2026, we saw a massive walkout of Department of Justice prosecutors. Six prosecutors, including the second in command, walked out over the Department of Justice civil rights division refusal to even investigate the shooting of Renee Good in Minnesota. That's literally their job. That's what they're for. It's. It's about civil rights. It's also for law enforcement. Instances of excessive force and their refusal to and even investigate was such a clear display of a lack of interest in justice and a lack of interest in civilization rights that several of those prosecutors walked out. But for Prosecutors in the 1960s, this legal strategy required creativity. But it was grounded in a specific reality. The Selma movement was operating under a federally approved court order. When judge Frank Johnson ruled in Williams vs. Wallace that marchers had the right to proceed from Selva to Montgomery, he placed the movement's activities squarely under the protection of the federal government. Federal prosecutors argued that that wo in transporting marchers and supplies was assisting individuals engaged in the exercise of a federally protected march. Federally protected rights. The clan in targeting her vehicle was not simply Committing murder, it was attempting to intimidate and obstruct the exercise of those rights. This argument reframed the case entirely. Instead of proving premeditated homicide beyond a reasonable doubt in front of a state jury steeped in racial bias, prosecutors needed to show that the defendants conspired to use force to interfere with a federally protected activity. The statute did not require them to prove who fired the fatal shot. That wasn't important to the argument. It required them to prove participation in a conspiracy. That distinction would become crucial. Gary Thomas Row, the FBI informant, became the cornerstone of this strategy. His testimony was both indispensable and deeply compromised. He took part of the murder, but he was also also the reason the FBI knew about it so quickly. On one hand, he was the only witness who could directly describe what the Klansmen said and did inside the car. On the other hand, his credibility was riddled with problems because he was an informant. He had a documented history of violence and had participated in previous Klan attacks while being paid by the FBI, a fact that placed the Bureau in an ethically problematic position. Clearly, federal prosecutors, including James B. Turner, faced a dilemma. Using Roe risk tainting the case. But without him, there would be no case. Turner's position, position echoed in his later writings, was that justice often required imperfect tools. Roe, however morally compromised, was the key to securing a conviction in a system designed to protect the perpetrators. In December of 1965, the federal government brought Wilkins, Eaton and Thomas to trial under code 241 in the U.S. district Court for the Middle District of Alabama. The trial represented something unprecedented. A direct federal attack on the impunity of white supremacist violence. Violence. Unlike the state trials, the jury pool was not exclusively white. Though still contrained, constrained by the region, federal courtroom procedure allowed prosecutors more leeway than they did in the Alabama courts. And the presence of federal authorities itself signaled a different kind of power dynamic. Rowe testified at length. He described the pursuit, the racial slurs shouted in the car, of the decision to kill the occupants of Luizo's vehicle and the shots fired from the passing car. His testimony was graphic, and it was detailed. Defense attorneys to attempted to discredit him by highlighting his long involvement in the Klan and suggesting that he, not Wilkins, had fired the fatal shots. They insinuated that the FBI had orchestrated or encouraged the attack, an accusation impossible to prove, but potent enough to make jurors uncomfortable. I mean, after all, this man is on the payroll of the Bureau. The government countered by emphasizing the law's focus on conspiracy, not on Identifying the shooter. The question was not who pulled the trigger. It was whether the defendants participated in a coordinated attempt to terrorize citizens engaged in federal protected activities. The evidence supported that conclusion, overwhelmingly so. The federal jury found Wilkins, Eaton and Thomas guilty. Each man received a 10 year sentence with a which is the maximum penalty under that code 241 at the time, which is crazy to only do 10 years for conspiracy to murder. But I understand that their only route, the only they couldn't retry them for murder. The only route they could go, you know, because you can't double jeopardy. The only route they could go with this 10 years is better than nothing. But the biggest, the most significant part of it was that these were the first modern civil rights convictions in the Deep South. For the killing of a civil rights worker, the verdict marked a turning point in the federal government's willingness to intervene where states refused to act. The victory was complicated though. First, the sentence was comparatively light. Obviously the murder of a civil rights worker resulted in less prison time than many non nonviolent federal offenses, things like insurance fraud. Second, rose involvement in the case cast a long shadow. Even as the federal government celebrated the conviction of convictions, allegations circulated, circulated that the FBI had been too permissive with this informant, that Roe had participated in violence with impunity, knowing he had essentially FBI immunity and that the Bureau had more knowledge of the Klan activities than it was willing to admit. These issues would erupt into scandal years later. But even in 1965, the tension was visible. The same federal government that had secured the convictions had also reason to fear scrutiny. The Bureau's public response to the Louiso murders revealed this uneven knees. Almost immediately after the killing, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, who I really need to do an episode on because this guy began circulating rumors about Viola Luizo's personal life. He started releasing internal memos that portrayed her as unstable, sexually promiscuous, because of course, let's slut shame her. That means that she deserves to be murdered or audible gasp, involved with drugs. Fabrications designed to undercut sympathy for her and deflect criticism from the FBI's handling of Roe. These rumors were collectively linked to leaked to local officials, politicians and members of the press. They reflected a profound institutional defensiveness and of course, deep misogyny. Hoover, however, wanted to protect the FBI from accusations that it had failed to prevent the murder or had mishandled its informant. Again, we saw this with Renee Good where immediately afterward and I saw someone that I went to high school. Share this on threads and I was so Mad about it. He was like, do you libtards know that you're defending someone who abused her kids and put, put out cigarettes on her kids skin? Which whenever you see that specific accusation immediately fact check it. Every time I have seen the far right and Christian nationalist try to discredit someone who was murdered like in a civil rights situation, that accusation always come up that specifically putting out your cigarettes on a child's skin specifically comes up. So fact check them anyway. But especially if you see that one, they're like she only has one of her three kids because the other two kids were abused. None of that is true. True, totally made up. And literally on my former high school buddy's post underneath it on X it says this is false. Like it said it was un. It was completely false. There's no police records, there's no CPS complaints, there's no allegations of abuse. And her ex husband was like that never happened. The reason two of the kids were with me was they wanted to stay in Colorado because they had their friends here, they were happy here and she allowed them to do that. She literally did what was best for her kids. They also also created false arrest records where they got her birthday wrong putting her at over 45 years of age when she was only 37. And there's rumors that she was a drug addict and she was this. And then of course not the sexually promiscuous part. But you, I cannot tell you how many comments I've seen of. Well, you know, serves the lesbian right. Like because she was a lesbian, she deserved to get shot in the face. This is not new. This is standard tactics to deflect attention, to deflect guilt, to deflect culpability, justify the shooting, especially when it's a woman. But we saw the same thing with George Floyd. Well he has an arrest record. I don't care. You still don't get to kneel on him for 12 minutes or however long it was and pretend that he deserved it because he got arrested, he did his time. You're. And it doesn't even matter if you're actually a criminal, if you were actually caught committing a crime, you still don't deserve to be killed with impunity. You deserve to go to trial. But especially like sexual promiscuity, questioning their relationships, their divorce or a woman's sexuality is so common to basically say, well she wasn't one of the good ones. She doesn't, she doesn't deserve justice. She, I mean she kind of deserved to die. She's the lowest of the low. We see this attitude with law enforcement and sex workers. When sex workers are killed, well, it's not like it was that big of a deal that this person died. Portrayed very differently from the good Christian white blonde schoolgirl. Right? But Hoover just wanted to protect the FBI, so it didn't matter. It didn't matter that it was lie. It was coordinated. And we're seeing now just how much administrations and agencies lie because now we can clock it in real time. The smear campaign was rooted not only in bureaucratic self preservation, but also engendered in racial politics. Luiso had violated the norms of white womanhood by traveling alone, supporting a black led movement, and riding with a young black man. How dare you? It's just racial slut shaming. Because she was driving this activist home, and because she drove down from Detroit as a white woman by herself, it very much sounds like, well, what were you thinking going outside of the house without a man with you? For as much as, you know, Christian nationalists and white supremacists kind of openly demonize the Taliban. They love what the Taliban does with women. Because the Taliban, if a woman is raped because she's out without a man, they're like, well, that's your fault. You should have had a man with you. Because we can't hold the people that do it accountable anyways. The FBI weaponized these stereotypes to imply moral impropriety. Again, what a. And I say that obviously, incredibly facetiously, because that is so stupid. The narrative was clear. If Luizo had been harmed, it was because she behaved recklessly. Well, what were you wearing? Not because white supremacists conspired and had committed an act of political and racial terror. These lies caused profound damage to her family, who endured harassment, harassment, death threats, and the burden of defending her reputation while also still actively grieving her loss. This episode reveals one of the central contradictions of the Luizo case. The federal government could be both the mechanism of justice and also the source of profound injustice. Profound demonization. The Justice Department Civil Rights Division fought tirelessly to secure the convictions. But the FBI simultaneously undermined Luisa's law legacy to protect itself. It was a stark demonstration that progress in the civil rights era often came through institutions that were themselves deeply compromised and prejudiced. Despite these complexities, the federal convictions in the Loo case helped establish crucial legal precedent. They demonstrated that the federal government could use civil rights statutes to prosecute racial violence when states refused to act. This approach would later be used in other landmark cases, including the convictions related to the murders of civil rights workers in Mississippi and the attacks on activists in Louisiana and Georgia. But even as the legal landscape shifted, Selma and the Louiso murder revealed another truth. Legal remedies alone could not dismantle the social and cultural foundations of white supremacy. The trials punished individual perpetrators, but the broader system that enabled their violence remained deeply entrenched. The Voting Rights act of 1965, passed later that summer, attempted to address the structural side of disenfranchised. It suspended literary tests, authorized federal oversight of voter registration, and empowered the Department of Justice to challenge discriminatory election practices. Selma had forced the nation to confront the brutality required to maintain racial exclusion. Luizo's murder underscored the human cost of that system. For many Americans, particularly in the North, Louisa's death was a wake up call. The killing of a white woman who had traveled to Alabama to support black citizens made the violence of segregation impossible. Dismiss to, quote as, quote, a regional problem. It also revealed the deep hostility towards white allies who crossed racial boundaries. To segregationists, such acts were not just political, they were existential threats to the racial hierarchy. But while lo became a national symbol of interracial solidarity within Alabama, her legacy was far more contested. Many whites viewed her as an outside agitator, a meddler, a woman who had abandoned her family. Well, she should have been at home taking care of her children and husband. How intense, decent. These narratives were strategically cultivated to delegitimize the civil rights movement and to maintain local power structures. Understanding this backlash is crucial because it illuminates the cultural environment in which the Klan operated. White supremacist organizations do strength from community attitudes. They acted with confidence because they believed correctly that their communities would tolerate, excuse, and celebrate their actions. The Klan was not an isolated fringe. It was embedded in the social fabric of the the region. This context shaped not only the murder, but also the aftermath. The federal government could convict a handful of men, but it could not instantly transform the cultural and political conditions that produced those men. Nor could it fully protect the Luizo family, who returned to Detroit to face a torrent of hate mail, harassment, and psychological trauma. The end of the federal trial did not end the story. It opened a new chapter, one that is still stretching across decades, shaped by new investigations, shifting public memory, and the gradual emergence of fuller historical understanding of the Selma campaign. Campaign and I want to take a moment to address how important it is to listen to the words that are used, because systems like this use things like peer pressure, violence, gender norms, and things like, quote, decency, or quote Traditional family values or quote traditional Christian whatever to demonize movements for equality, to demonize good movements for women. They'll use shaming your sexuality or shaming your divorce or shaming you as a person. You, well, you just weren't a good enough mother. If you were being a good mother, this never would have have happened to you. It's a way to deflect responsibility and a way to avoid the conversation. So when you hear things thrown around around like about someone like that, really be aware, really be attentive to why are they attacking this person with this? Is this relevant to the conversation? Is this relevant to the incident that occurred? I remember that I was never taught about Martin Luther King or what he did because my dad instead was, well, we can't pay attention to anything good he did because he had a affairs. That's the deflection. But they don't hold the same standard of that to other white leaders. Instead it becomes well, God uses imperfect tools. Well nobody's perfect. Well we all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. Listen for those discrepancies. And the thing is is they're right in the sense that nobody is perfect. But we can hold somebody accountable for their actions without diminishing civil rights movements, without diminishing their value and their worth and with being honest about their character as a person. Just because someone did something wrong in their, their past doesn't mean that they deserve to get killed and it doesn't discredit their life's work. We can do both. We can, we can look at a situation individually and also hold people accountable for their actions separate to that incident. Those are, those are two things that can happen. People who operate in the extremes are participating in a straw man argument by acting as if it can only be one extreme or the other. The federal convictions in the Louizo case mark the first time in modern American history that white supremacists were successfully prosecuted by the federal government government for killing a civil rights worker. Now this is a legal milestone again. It doesn't resolve the deep retentions that are embedded in the South. The Louisa murder became the center of decades long struggle over memory, meaning and truth. And this was shaped by region, sexism, misogyny and also by racism and political expediency. In Detroit, the Louisa family returned from Alabama in a storm of hostility. They received hate mail daily. Strangers called the house to curse her name and threaten violence on her family. Her children, already reeling from from the trauma of losing their mother, now faced an onslaught of cruelty from people who saw Viola not as a hero, but as a race traitor or worse, a woman whose death was her own fault. Again, remember, if you had been home with your children, this wouldn't have happened to you. I've actually seen comments on Instagram towards Renee Good saying that, well, if she was home taking care of the house, this wouldn't have happened. As if not being a homemaker means you she deserved to die. White supremacists spread rumors that she had abandoned her children, run off with black men, that she had audible gas, slept with black men, or. Or engaged in behav they deemed immoral. These lies were not organic. Again, these were the narratives that had been released and seeded by the FBI. They just took those rumors and ran with it. Same thing we see on social media today. The Bureau smear campaign became one of the most shameful episodes in history. Hoover south the Louisa case as potentially a public relations nightmare. The presence of Gary Rowe in the murder raised questions about the FBI's oversight. Could the Bureau have failed to prevent the killing? Were they hiding something? Were they participating in clandestine violence? And then, rather than risk that scrutiny, Hoover decided he would drag a woman through the mud. Again, these FBI memos labeled Luizo as emotionally unstable, promiscuous, drug addicted. There's no basis in fact. Precisely zero. But that. That wasn't the point. The point was to spread the lie. Agents were instructed to spread these rumors discreetly. You know, don't. Don't make it so obvious like we're seeing today. The goal was simple. If the public believe Luito was irresponsible or immoral, they would be less likely to question the FBI's actions. It was a calculated act of character assassination. It worked to an alarming degree. For years, misinformation about Luizo circulated widely. Journalists repeated the rumors. Politicians invoked them. Even people otherwise sympathetic to the civil rights movement sometimes believed the lies. The FBI had weaponized misogyny and racism to deflect attention from its own failures and dishonesty. And the public absorbed those narratives with little skepticism. While the FBI said it, it's an internal memo, it wasn't supposed to be seen by. By us. There's no chance that they leaked that to you on purpose. The damage to the Luizo family was immense, her children, of course, being the most impacted. Struggling with grief, stigma, and conflicting public narratives, they faced the burden of defending their mother's integrity against institutional lies. The trauma highlighted a larger truth about the civil rights martyrdom. The families of those who die for justice Often bear disproportionate personal suffering, Even as a nest nation celebrates the larger cause. While the smear campaign polluted public understanding of the case, Another force shaped the long term narrative. The rise of historical scholarship on Selma, the voting rights act, and the role of white allies in the civil rights movement. Historians began to situate the Louisa story with broader patterns of gender and race. They examined why certain deaths gained national attention, while others went relatively unnoticed. Louiso's whiteness played a complicated role. On the one hand, her death drew national outrage that helped sustain momentum for the voting Rights Act. The killing of a white woman underscored the brutality of southern segregation segregationists in ways that reached white northerners and in compelled them to move, compelled them to voice, compelled them to act who would otherwise would have remained ambivalent because they had been ambivalent previously. On the other hand, her race made her a target of different kinds of hostility within the South. White supremacists viewed her as a traitor to her racial identity. They believed that white women were symbols of purity and racial continuity, not independent political actors capable of moral judgment. Judgment. White women, according to this ethic in the south, in white supremacy, in Christian nationalism, women are not people. You are a fixture. You are a necessary tool to promote the white race, to expand the right white race. But if you are, you are not an independent moral agent. You're not an independent political agent. Which is why they think that all women will be their happiest and most fulfilled being in the home, being a mom and being a wife. Because they don't see women as people. Because if you see women as human beings, you understand that not all human beings can fulfill the same role, the same career can thrive in the same environments. That's not how humans are. But if you don't see humans as white people, you see them as interchangeable. You can literally get. Get rid of one, dispose of them, replace them with another to fit the exact same role. You also don't see a problem in limiting them to that role. Scholars highlighted the gender dimensions of the backlash. Southern white womanhood had long been used as a justification for racism, violence, Particularly through the myth of protecting white women and their purity from black men. Louiso inverted that narrative by forming interracial alliances and acting on her own political convictions. Her agency destabilized the cultural mythology that underpinned segregation. In response, her enemies attacked her motherhood, her sexuality, her stability and her morality. Of course, many of these arguments were placed under a Christian guise of she was so immoral. Classic tactics that are used to discipline women who defy patriarchal boundaries. The story of how Louisa is remembered, or more accurately misremembered, reveals the extent to which racism and sexism are intertwined in the architecture of white supremacy. Her death forced the nation to reckon with the idea that white women could be both targets of racist violence and participants in anti racist struggle. The contradiction made her uniquely polarizing figure. While her family fought to preserve her legacy, the federal government continued to grapple with the implications of the case. As additional information about Gary Rowe emerged, it became increasingly clear that the FBI had mishandled its relationship with him. For years, Roe had been given extraordinary leeway to operate within the Klan. He had participating in beatings, assaults and other acts of violence while selectively reporting it to his handlers. The Bureau tolerated his actions because they believed he was providing valuable intelligence. The question that later investigators tried to answer was whether Roe could have prevented Luizo's murder or warned the FBI that the Klan intended to target civil rights workers that night. The record remains murky. What is clear is that the FBI either ignored the warnings, failed to act on intelligence, or underestimated the level of danger after the murder. They shielded Roe from prosecution and eventually relocated him under a new identity. Gotta save the racists. Treating him as both an asset and also a liability. And before I get into the 1975 church committee hearings, now is time for our second of two mid show sponsor breaks again. You can get these episodes ad free by subscribing@patreon.com Monster Monty Mader in 1975, during the church committee meetings, Roe emerged as a national figure once again. The Senate investigation into intelligent abuses forced the FBI to reveal the aspects of cointelpro, its covert operations against political groups, including both civil rights organizations and white supremacist groups. Roe testified publicly, revealing details that shocked the nation. He admitted publicly to participating in violent acts. He insisted that he had tried to warn the FBI about clan plans. He implied, without stating explicitly, that the Bureau had allowed some violence to occur to preserve his cover. The committee's findings did not prove that the FBI could have prevented Luizo's murders. But it did expose systemic failures. The Bureau had managed its informants poorly, tolerated illegal activity and manipulated public perception to protect itself from scrutiny. The hearings reshaped public understanding in the federal government's role in the civil rights era. They complicated the narrative of federal intervention as purely heroic. The truth was more tangled and messy, marked by moral compromises and institutional self interest. As historians re evaluated the era, they placed Luizo's murder with a continuum of violence that targeted not only black activists, but white allies who challenged segregation. James Reeb, who was murdered in Selma days before Luizo, had also been smeared by segregationists. And early in the movement, white allies such as Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwermer, murdered along James Cheney in Mississippi that we talked about earlier, had faced similar character assassinations and distortions. White supremacists understood that interracial solidarity threatened the very foundation of segregation. To maintain racial hierarchy, they needed to isolate black activists from their white supporters and to punish those supporters who crossed racial lines. And a quick sidebar here that white supremacy is a shield and a guard to protect capitalism, and it is a guard to protect the wealthy. It has been institutional to make wealth, to generate wealth and protect it, because, especially in the instance of being ripped off by elites or the 1 percenters controlling so much of the economy, if they can convince poor white people that they are better than poor black people or they're being taken advantage of by the poor brown person or the poor black person, they can convince white people not to unite with other poor people to demand justice and equality instead and. And prevent that uniting from taking power away from people that are actually abusing it. Now this was established. We're going to go over this in a different podcast episode in the Bacon Rebellion as a way for Jamestown elites to maintain control and prevent another rebellion where both white and black people advocated for more equal representation and more rights. What they did after that was gave the white people a little bit more power, a little bit more land ownership, a little bit more rights, so that they could elevate them slightly, tell them that the people underneath them, the real problem, were the Native Americans and the black people so that they wouldn't unite in rebellion again. Luiso's death was then not a personal tragedy. It was a strategic act within a larger system of terror. The Klan sought to enforce the racial order by demonstrating the consequences of collaboration. They intended the murder to intimidate both black activists and white supremacy supporters. The intention ultimately backfired on a national scale, but it succeeded locally in reinforcing fear. The federal response to Louiso's murders, excuse me, murder. Also contributed to tensions within the movement itself. Many activists viewed federal intervention as inconsistent and insufficient. While the Civil Rights Division fought tirelessly, the FBI's actions undermined trust. Of course, Hoover had always been hostile to the civil rights movement. He monitored Martin Luther King Jr. And Malcolm X, attempted to discredit movement leaders, and resisted calls to prioritize investigations into Klan violence. The contradiction between the Department of Justice's effort and the FBI's sabotage reflected a deeper conflict with the federal government itself. And if you listen to highway to Hell in my first season, when I talk about La Cosa Nostra, the Italian mob here in the United States, Hoover was a huge part of protecting the mob. As long as he did so, he was, he was very picky about what he would allow slide what he would confront, because he's demonizing Martin Luther King and Malcolm X while actively kind of shielding the mob in other ways. In the years after the trials, the memory of Selma became increasingly symbolic. The Voting Rights act transformed national policy, and Selma entered the canon of American rights history. But the story told in textbooks often flattened the complexity it sanitized. The version whitewashed and emphasized triumph and moral clarity. The fuller version is marked by by death, backlash, federal betrayal, all out lies by the administration and psychological trauma remain, and they still remain less widely known. Lou's place within that story was especially vulnerable to distortion. For decades, her name evoked controversy more than consensus, more than tragedy. In the late 20th century, through scholarship, documentaries and public memorials, did her reputation begin to stabilize as a symbol of interracial solidarity and personal courage. The union unveiling of memorials in Detroit, the naming of the freeway in her honor, the inclusion of her name on the civil Rights memorial in Montgomery, all contributed to the reclamation of her legacy. But her story also resonated with deeper themes. Not just the cost of allyship, but the dangers faced by women who defy sexist norms and the limits of institutional justice. These themes continue to influence contemporary discussions about civil rights, social activism, and the relationship between the movements and the state. The legacy of Selma and Luizo case reverberated into the 21st century, particularly as debates over voting rights intensified. Court's decisions that weakened the Voting Rights act revived questions about whether the gains achieved in 1965 were being eroded. The memory of the sacrifices made to make those gains possible, including Viola's sacrifice, became newly urgent. And to understand the full weight of the Louizo case, we have to look at the events themselves and the long afterlife of what happened after. In law, activism and public memory. The story did not end with the convictions of Wilkins, Eaton and Thomas. It stretched across generations, influencing legal strategies, shaping the narrative of the civil rights movement and revealing the tensions between federal authority and local resistance. As scholarships and historians really began to solidify the civil rights movement and what it stood for. What really happened? By the late 20th century, the new wave of Research also began to highlight the role of gender in shaping the public response to Luizo's death. Scholars examined how the intersection of race and gender made Luizo a uniquely threatening figure to segregationists. White women, listen up. We got powers. Her independence, her refusal to conform to traditional expectations of white womanhood and her involvement in a black led movement all challenged entrenched patriarchal assumptions. And ladies refuse to conform. They want to create a box to put women women in. They want to create a standard that you're immoral if you break out of by simply refusing to conform is in itself a powerful act of defiance. White supremacist ideology relies heavily on controlling white women's bodies and choices. White women are framed as symbols of racial purity used to justify violence against black men. We must protect our wives. A white woman asserting political agency in solidarity with black activists represented a direct assault on this logic. It completely disintegrates their own argument to segregationist. Luizo's presence in Selma is not just politically dangerous, it's ideologically intolerable because not only does it attack this idea of we have the right to enact violence on black people because we're protecting our white wives, but it also attacks their belief system of I get to control, dominate and abuse my wife because this is her role. It challenges both of those systems that this type of racially charged patriarchal system relies on. The FBI smear campaign exploited this same framework. By portraying Louiso as sexually immoral, emotionally unstable, the bureau tapped into cultural anxieties that made accusations believable to many Americans. We hear this going around today with red pill and incel culture. These lies were not incidental. These were strategic. They knew the response it would cause. Designed to align existing stereotypes with women who defined social norms in this way, the FBI's actions aligned, however unintentionally, with the very ideology they claimed they were were opposing. As historians situated Luiza within these gender dynamics, her story acquired a new depth. She was not merely a martyr of the civil rights movement. She was also an example of how women who cross boundaries are punished by the systems that rely on those boundaries for their stability. This analysis helped restore agency to Louisa's story, framing her not just as a victim defined solely by her death, but as a woman whose life represented an act of resistance. The emergence of feminist scholarship in the 1980s and 90s further enriched this under understanding. Researchers emphasized that Luizo's death highlighted the costs borne by women in social movements, not only those who died, but also those whose contributions have been marginalized or forgotten. They noted that many white women had participated in this movement, often in support roles. Yet their involvement was underrepresented in mainstream histories. Recovering Louisa's story became part of a broader project to recognize women's leadership, courage and sacrifice. Using women to challenge the system, using, using the privilege of white women that they have by race to. To really showcase this problem, to showcase this gender dynamic. In the 1990s and early 2000s, new documentaries, biographies and archival research brought additional clarity to her case. Interviews with Louiso's children revealed the emotional toll their mother's murder. In the decades long battle to reclaim her reputation. Filmmakers and historians revisited the events surrounding the murder, the federal trials and the FBI's involvement. These worked helped shift public understanding away from sensationalized narratives toward a more nuanced, historically grounded account account. Right. The sensationalism and it, it's, it's such. It's so much more fast now, right? Like these sensationalized stories fly and go viral so much more quickly. But the system was the same back then. It just took a little bit more time for everybody to hear about it and spread it and share it. But it has the same impact. During this period, the national memory of Selma itself underwent transformation. The 30th and 40th anniversaries of Selma to Montgomery March brought renewed attention to the movement. President Smoket commemoration commemorative events Civil rights veterans returned to the Edmund Pettus Bridge. The Voting Rights act was praised as a cornerstone of American democracy. In this climate, Luizo's story re entered public awareness that was no longer overshadowed by misinformation. Her name was added to the Civil Rights memorial in Montgomery. Designed by Maya Lynn, the memorial listed her alongside others who had died for the cause. Framing her sacrifice within a broad lineage of martyrs. Wayne State University awarded her a posthumous honorary doctorate. Statues, plaques and historical markers preserved her memory in places where her story had once been distorted or ignored. Yet even as Louisa was restored to her rightful place in civil rights history, a new challenge emerged. The erosion of the very protections her death helped secure. Starting in the early 2010s court decisions weakened key provisions of the Voting Rights Act. States enacted restrictive voter ID laws, closed political places in minority neighborhoods. We saw last year with the excessively gerrymandered maps being proposed by Texas and redrew districts in ways that diluted black political power. They're still doing it. Scholars, activists and civil rights veterans warned that the spirit of Selma was being undermined. Louisa's story took on renewed relevance in this context. Her sacrifice had helped lay the groundwork for the Voting Rights act to happen in the first place. A law that is now under attack. Her death symbolized the cost of securing democratic voting rights and her memory became a tombs tombstone. Her memory became a touchstone in debates about voter suppression and racial justice. The struggles she fought for were not relics of the past, but ongoing conflicts. In the final analysis, the story of Selma and Viola Luizo murder is not simply about a crime or a trial. It's about a network of forces. It's about what America actually is, not what we claim to be legal, cultural, political and personal and religion that intersect in a single moment of violence. It's about how institutions can both dispense justice and perpetuate injustice. It's about how social movements rely on just normal people, just like you and me, to show up and take part of it, but to also be willing to take extraordinary risk. It's about how public memory evolves and how truth must be defended against distortion. This is also a story about the cost of democracy. The Selma campaign revealed that the right to vote, the right to equality, the right to dignity are not given freely. They were fought for at great human expense, at the cost of human lives. People in positions of power will not relinquish that power willingly. They have never done it in history. They're not going to start now. Viola Louiso paid that cost on a dark Alabama highway. Her death exposed the depth of white supremacist hatred, the limits of local justice, and the necessity of federal intervention. It also revealed the fragility of truth in the face of institutional power. When that institution wants to protect its own reputation more than it wants to protect the truth. The long aftermath of her murder, marked by federal trials, smear campaigns, Senate investigations, scholarly re evaluations and public memorials, demonstrate the meaning of Selma is not fixed. It's contested, it's reshaped, it's reinterpreted by each generation. And certain truths do endure. The courage of those who march, the brutality of those who resisted that march, the complexity of the federal government, the fact that you can't trust any administration or agency just because they have those three letters. And the ongoing struggle for civil rights, the ongoing struggle for civil rights that we have not fully achieved achieved yet. Viola Luisa's story exists at the intersection of these truths. She was a mother, a student, an activist, a woman, a witness to injustice, who refused to remain silent. She refused to conform. She refused to say yes. And she refused to allow people to bully her, using a cultural norm into staying silent because she understood that silence is complicity. Her life and her death remind us that a democracy is not maintained by institutions alone, but by people who deeply believe in its promise. Her legacy challenges us to confront the forces of racism, patriarchy, sexism, state violence, and historical distortion that continue to threaten those promises today. She challenges us to be brave in the face of risk, when we know that what institutions are doing is wrong, that we know that just because something is legal doesn't make it right. The story of Selma and the murder of Viola Luiza is not just history. It's a warning. It's so relevant, a reminder that democracy survives only when ordinary people choose courage over comfort. And if we're honest, the burden of that choice has never fallen equally. Black Americans, specifically black women, have carried the weight of this fight for generations. For generations, they have done this work. They have led this charge at very great personal risk. And it is high time to answer the question of whether white Americans will willingly and finally carry the their share, especially white women. Because we have way too often been in service of the very systems that oppress us, because we think that the proximity to that power is going to be good for us. We have watched white women throughout history serve racial institutions, thinking it made them superior, while those same white men are telling them, you don't deserve to go to school, you don't deserve to vote, you don't deserve a bank account, you don't deserve education. Your only purpose is to get in the kitchen and make a sandwich. We have allowed those men to demean us while still carrying water for them. And it's high time that we, especially as white women in America, change that. Change that trajectory, change who we work for. Not just standing up for the interests of others and for equality as a whole, standing up for our own interests for a change. The forces that killed Luizo did not disappear. They evolved. They traded white robes for online forums, backroom meetings and legislative chambers. The Ku Klux Klan. White robe can now come in ice tactical black. They traded chains for voter restrictions, book bans, and laws designed to silence and intimidate. The same fear that drove white supremacists to chase down Viola is still alive in efforts to roll back voting rights, erase history, resegregate schools, defund public education, and punish those who challenge a racial hierarchy, even if that race right now happens to be people of Latina descent because they're in immigrants, white people have a choice. In moments like these, we can retreat into the comfort of believing things aren't that bad, let ourselves be A pale wallflower. Or we can step into the discomfort of action. We can choose risk over comfort for something so much bigger than ourselves. And history shows exactly what happens when white silence wins. Black communities pay the price. Immigrant communities pay the price. Marginalized communities like the LGBTQ community pay the price. History has also shows what happens when white people refuse to be shielded by privilege and instead choose courage and solidarity. Louisa's life proves that courage is not abstract. It's a decision. It is a choice we get to make to show up. We get to decide what we're going to do in this moment in history. We get to decide what does the book of my life look like? What do I want my grandkids to know about me? What do I want to be able to tell them? I stood for a decision to risk our comfort, our reputation, sometimes our safety for a world that is more than just the one that we were handed. Just because the America that I was raised to believe exists has never existed doesn't mean it can't. So the call to action today for this episode is simple and urgent. Not just to learn, not just to make sure we know our history, that we study it. But show up, speak up when racism is whispered in private and when it's shouted in public. Challenge misogynist rhetoric. Don't allow someone to make a rape trick joke and let that shit slide. We're called to protect voting rights, like our democracy depends on it, because it does. Because if voting rights can be taken away from anyone, they can also be taken away from you. Learn the history that others are trying to ban. Follow the leadership of black organizers without centering ourselves again. Black women have led the way. We can learn a lot from them. And it's high time we put our body, our money, our voice, and our vote behind Judge Justice. Civil rights work is not nostalgia. It's not a chapter that ended. It's a fight unfolding right now at school board meetings, state legislatures, at the ballot box, at protests, and in every conversation where truth is on the line. Every little action you do, every little moment of resistance, every little moment of defiance, is part of this movement. If the story of Viola Luizo teaches us anything, it's that white people cannot wait for someone else to act. We can't wait for someone else to do. Do it. Justice only moves when we do in the United States. And the cost of waiting is always paid by someone who is more vulnerable than we are. And the question is not whether or not the movement continues. The question is whether or not we'll join it. And that's it for today for Flipping Tables. I want to say a special thanks to Phoenix Studios and Sea Rawls for producing this podcast episode. A big thank you to Laura and Battles who are working behind the scenes to help me organize. Thanks to the two Amanda's. We now have one who's working as a private assistant for me here in Nashville and the other who is teamed up with me to do some research for this podcast. Very excited about that and I want to take a minute to give a special shout out to Patreon supporters. Thank you so much for making this happen because if you weren't doing this, none of this happens because I wouldn't be able to afford it. Rain Riven, Suze Kinara Yanitsa, Alicia Alvarez, Anna Russell, Brent Belle Ange, Amy Salig, Xavier Neal, Xo Ocean, Dement, Jenna Payne, Joy Sawyer, Ellen Parrott, Amanda Watson, Claire Michelle L, Shelly Norman, Heather Marlette, Leah, Vanessa Stiff, William Bogle, Tara Reader, Betsa Wingert, Rhett Amick, William o', Malley, William Hayes, Jacqueline Wilkins and George Whitmore. Thank you so much for donating. Thank you so much for being part of this movement. Thank you so much for listening and being willing to learn and challenge yourself. Please always stay curious, stay hopeful and I will see you next week on Flipping Tables.