She was soon attending the weekly talks held by the school chaplain, a Christian existentialist named Rev. There, at age 38, she was surrounded by student debates about the civil rights movement. In 1963, Vi began studying philosophy, sociology, and political science at Wayne State University. Vi often felt like she was the only one who cared. However, all of her early protests were solitary and lonely. She rebelled against injustices in other institutions as well – she was even arrested for protesting the Detroit board of education. Vi was fired after she drew public attention to these inequities.

When a secretary was laid off without severance pay, Vi turned her own check over to the secretary, and tried to organize other workers to chip in. Men were paid overtime, and women weren’t. She graduated with top honors, but was infuriated by gender inequities in the workplace. In 1961, when her youngest child was three, Vi started attending night school to become a medical assistant. Vi also read multiple books a week, stayed up late at night journaling, and read Plato and Thoreau to her five kids. She was energetic and kind: Vi always gave money to the homeless, and drove her husband crazy taking in whatever stray animals she and the children encountered. Vi’s children remember her as a woman who loved taking them on rock collecting expeditions, barefoot nature walks, and to planetariums, rodeos, and circuses. She soon remarried, to a Teamsters union official, who she had another three children with. She married during her first year in Detroit, had two children, and divorced in 1949. At age 18, she moved by herself to Detroit, where she worked as a cashier and a waitress. “Vi,” as she was affectionally called, left school at age 14. Viola’s childhood was spent living in one-room shacks with no running water, moving from place to place throughout Georgia and Tennessee as her mother sought work.

During the Great Depression, her father’s hand was blown off in a mining accident, and Viola’s family became completely dependent on her mother’s meager teaching salary. Viola Liuzzo was born in 1925, to a mother who was a teacher, and a father who was a coal miner and a World War I veteran.

Home of the brave viola liuzzo