The documentary includes familiar film of marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge and of demonstrators in Birmingham being attacked with fire hoses, but it distinguishes itself with touching film of Jim Liuzzo and his children being interviewed and of political leaders of the day. Three men were convicted in a federal trial of violating Liuzzo's civil rights and served time. 'Maybe the good Lord didn't want me to see anything,' he says now. Leroy Moton, her 17-year-old passenger, passed out and could not identify the killers. She was shot in the face on a dark highway.

Martin Luther King Jr.'s voting-rights march from Selma to Montgomery and to chauffeur prospective black voters. In March 1965, Liuzzo drove to Alabama to participate in the Rev. More than one white Southerner asked what kind of woman would 'go off and leave her children like that,' so it's not inappropriate that the talking heads in 'Home of the Brave' include Gloria Steinem and the author Phyllis Chesler.

She was the 39-year-old wife of a Teamsters official in Michigan, the twice-divorced mother of five children (three from her second marriage), a nursing student, a coal miner's daughter and a disillusioned Roman Catholic turned Unitarian.

She wasn't a clean-cut Ivy League student from an affluent family taking a semester off to do her bit for the downtrodden. Maybe Liuzzo didn't fit the profile that some people hoped for. Paola di Florio's poignant documentary 'Home of the Brave,' which opens today in Manhattan, is the freshly outraging story of Liuzzo's death and of her difficult legacy to her children. Edgar Hoover was promoting the same view. Liuzzo, I was taught, was a malignant busybody and a tramp.

She was the Northern white woman who was shot to death the next year in Lowndes County, closer to home, while driving a car with a young black man beside her. In my home, those young men, murdered in Mississippi in 1964, were referred to simply as 'the three civil rights workers.' The better to depersonalize them, I guess.īut the name Viola Liuzzo stuck with me. Growing up white in Alabama, I never learned the names Chaney, Schwerner and Goodman.

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