The day when Viola Liuzzo died

A brutal attack by police on peaceful marchers in 1965 put a small Alabama town on the map, galvinized the American civil rights movement and created heroes and martyrs whose names live on today.

The town was Selma and one of those heroes and martyrs was a Detroit housewife named Viola Liuzzo. The clash on the Edmund Pettus Bridge outside Selma on March 7 of that year was captured dramatically on network television and focused the eyes of the nation for the first time on the brutality that blacks still faced from their own local governments in the south. Anthony and Viola Liuzzo in a 1949 photo.

Dr. Martin Luther King had organized the march with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, to draw attention to the plight of blacks who were denied the right to vote. In the book, "Selma 1965," Charles E. Fager described the event. After Dr. King announced the planned march down Route 80 from Selma to Montgomery, the capital of Alabama, then-Governor George Wallace banned the march and called out state troopers to block their path, despite assurances from march leaders that the demonstration would be peaceful.As the 600 marchers moved out from Brown Chapel African Church and started across the Pettus bridge, they could see the line of troopers spread shoulder to shoulder across the highway. At the command "troopers, advance" they charged into the crowd, swinging their billy clubs. The younger marchers escaped, the elderly were knocked to the pavement, wooden clubs thudding into their flesh.

When other marchers came to their aid they were sprayed with clouds of tear gas. A sheriff's posse on horseback joined the fray using bullwhips, ropes and lengths of rubber tubing covered with barbed wire while pursuing the marchers through downtown. Network television captured the assault on Highway 80 for a shocked American public, clearly showing the peaceful marchers, the flailing police clubs, the stampeding horses, the jeering onlookers and the stricken, fleeing blacks. In Atlanta, an infuriated Dr. King sent out telegrams to every prominent clergyman sympathetic to the SCLC, reading in part, "In the vicious maltreatment of defenseless citizens of Selma, where old women and young children were gassed and clubbed at random, we have witnessed an eruption of the disease of racism which seeks to destroy all America. No American is without responsibility.