Reverend Senator Raphael Warnock (D-GA), who was re-elected on December 6, 2022, with the help of substantial black turnout despite GOP voter suppression efforts, paid tribute in his victory speech to five civil rights martyrs by name (see story here).
One of those victims of racial hatred was Viola Liuzzo (shown in the Selma march in one of the photos below), a white civil rights worker who was murdered by the Ku Klux Klan on March 25, 1965.
Liuzzo was shot while traveling on an Alabama highway by four men in a car, one of whom was an FBI informant (he wasn’t the shooter). Wikipedia says (here), “In an effort to deflect attention from [the] informant, the FBI produced disinformation for politicians and the press, stating that Liuzzo was a member of the Communist Party, heroin addict, and had abandoned her children to have sexual relationships with African-Americans involved in the Civil Rights Movement.
That happened when J. Edgar Hoover (bio here) ran the FBI. His name once synonymous with crime-fighting, he is remembered today chiefly for his abuses of power, including his targeting of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and secret surveillance of Vietnam anti-war protesters. When Liuzzo’s family learned 18 years later what the FBI had done, they tried but failed to sue the agency.
Hoover’s been dead 50 years and the FBI is under new management today. Trump wants you to believe they’re still bad guys. We should make him prove it.
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