Almost 60 years after dashing into the history books as a terrified teenager in one of the civil rights era’s most infamous killings, Leroy Moton died quietly last September at age 78.
In 2019, I interviewed Moton, who had been a bespectacled Alabama high-schooler the night he survived the 1965 Ku Klux Klan shooting of Viola Liuzzo, the only White woman slain in the civil rights movement. He described how hours after marching from Selma to Montgomery with Martin Luther King Jr. and 25,000 other protesters, he was riding back to Selma with Liuzzo in the passenger seat of her Oldsmobile when a carload of White men spotted them. Infuriated to see a young Black man with the blonde nursing student, they fired into the car, which swerved and crashed. Knocked unconscious, Moton awakened in the darkness beside Liuzzo’s motionless body. Fearing the killers were nearby, he sprinted in work boots through murky farmland and ran briefly back to the car before tearing onto the deserted highway. Finally he flagged down a Selma-bound truck filled with weary marchers that took him to safety.
