Mar 10, 2021 2 min read

A newly formed nonprofit is planning a memorial to California Borough native Viola Gregg Liuzzo, who was murdered by the Ku Klux Klan 56 years ago in Alabama.

California Area re:Generations is raising money to memorialize Liuzzo, a white woman who was killed while working for voter rights for Black people in Selma.

“We need a hero, people to look up to for doing the right thing,” said Rosemary Capanna, a board member with the organization.

Liuzzo was born April 11, 1925, on Park Street in East Pike Township before it was folded into neighboring California Borough. The house where she lived was eventually demolished to expand the California University of Pennsylvania campus.

By March 1965 she was living in Detroit and watched Alabama state troopers on television attack about 600 protesters on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma in what became known as Bloody Sunday. Liuzzo later answered Dr Martin Luther King Jr.’s call to go to Selma to resume the march to Montgomery.

Liuzzo’s family experienced discrimination as they lived in a California neighborhood reserved for immigrants and later when her parents relocated to the Georgia when she was about 6 years old, Capanna said.

“By all accounts she was an intelligent, strong, empathetic woman who wanted to make the world a better place,” the nonprofit states on its website.

The march was completed March 25. Liuzzo was driving Leroy Moton, a young Black man, that day along Route 80 when a vehicle pulled alongside her car and one of its passengers opened fire, delivering a fatal wound to her head. Moton pretended to be dead in order to survive.

The death of Liuzzo, a mother of five, jarred the nation, and she was the only white woman acknowledged as a Civil Rights martyr.

Capanna said the nonprofit has an application pending for a state historical marker dedicated to Liuzzo. A location for the memorial has yet to be finalized.

The nonprofit also plans to distribute small grants for community improvement projects within the California Area School District.

For more information, visit calregenerations.org/.