My daughter Lauren was about six months old in March 1965 and we lived in Philadelphia.  There were a lot of awful things happening then  — kind of a storm of shit that battered us those years: including civil rights, Vietnam.  That winter, on March 25, Viola Liuzzo, a 40-year-old housewife and voter registration worker from Detroit, was shot to death by the Ku Klux Klan on an Alabama highway.  She was registering black voters in Selma with Martin Luther King and she driving a car with a black passenger.  That was her offense.

It’s not that any of us knew her personally.  But we knew who she was: part of the volunteer cadre of civil rights workers in Mississippi and Alabama who challenged racism, America’s great Original Sin.  You probably know that just fifty years ago — my adult lifetime —  our country was still segregated racially.  It was thoughtlessly, simply, legally, the way things were, and not just in the South.

Anyway, a couple of weeks before the Liuzzo murder Selma police conscripted and deputized all the young white men and town and led them to attack civil rights marchers at the Pettus bridge. the whole world watched and it was a huge outrage.