Hope you got to see the American Experience documentary on The Ku Klux Klan this evening. In it I saw some vintage film I’d not seen before, but there was one I had seen, and tonight’s airing of it reminded me of the several times CBS News crews have captured and aired material that has a profound effect on America’s future. Viola Liuzzo, a Unitarian civil rights activist from Michigan. In March 1965 she was a housewife and mother of 5 with who heeded the call of Martin Luther King Jr and traveled from Detroit, Michigan to Selma, Alabama in the wake of the Bloody Sunday attempt at marching across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Driving back from a trip shuttling fellow activists to the Montgomery airport, she was shot by members of the Ku Klux Klan. She was 39 years old. The tree members of the Klan charged with the murder got out on bail and were paraded before a Klan rally of some 6,000 in North Carolina. The applause and hoots from the audience was astounding. That film clip, shown on the CBS Evening News spurred a congressional investigation and eventually led to the imprisonment of Klan Grand Dragon Bob Jones and the withering of the Ku Klux Klan in the late 60s. https://youtube/watch?v=niXhOmxr4EM
Posted on: Wed, 14 Jan 2015 03:22:28 +0000
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