This week in 1965, Harry Belafonte organized the “Stars for Freedom” rally outside Montgomery, AL, to celebrate the end of the successful march from Selma to Montgomery. Entertainers who flew in included Belafonte himself, Tony Bennett, Frankie Laine, Peter, Paul and Mary, Sammy Davis, Jr., Joan Baez and Nina Simone. The next day, Thursday, March 25, 25,000 people marched the last stretch to the steps of the State Capitol Building where King delivered the speech “How Long, Not Long.”
That night, Viola Liuzzo, the wife of a Teamsters staff organizer from Michigan and mother of five, active Unitarian Universalist, and part-time student at Wayne State University, who had driven south to volunteer in the Civil Movement, was, with the help of a young African-American man named Leroy Moton, driving entertainers back to the airport. Traveling back from the airport (in one report after having just dropped off Tony Bennett and Billy Eckstine), Liuzzo and Moton where shoved to the side of the road by a car of Klansmen who then opened fire, hitting Liuzzo twice in the head and killing her instantly. Covered in her blood but not having been hit by the bullets, Moton played dead in the wrecked car and later escaped. // Ned Stuckey-French
