![]() ![]() The trauma of her sudden death caused her to bury any memories of her mother. ![]() In the mid-60s she was an angry kid in the midst of a personal rebellion with her mother. Mary, the middle daughter, decides to retrace her mother's road trip from Detroit to Selma with the filmmakers. Parallel to the Civil Rights struggle for which Viola lost her life is the present-day journey of her five children. After delving through thousands of pages of government documents and filming interviews with leaders in the fields of politics, history and forensics psychology, the filmmakers shed a new light on this complicated, buried story. This discrediting of her name - mostly based on her gender and wholly unfounded - succeeded in erasing Viola Liuzzo from our cultural memory. Edgar Hoover and the FBI, as a means of diverting attention from the fact that a key FBI informant was in the car with Liuzzo's killers. Immediately following her murder, Liuzzo became the target of a smear campaign, mounted by J. Why do we not know the story of Viola Luizzo, while nearly everyone has heard of Goodman, Schwerner and Cheney - the three rights workers killed the year before in Mississippi? The reasons are complex, and won't be found in history books. Her murder is attributed by historians of the era as providing the final piece of leverage that won Johnson approval of the Act in Congress, which forever changed our political landscape. Liuzzo's death came at a pivotal moment in the civil rights movement, when President Johnson had been fighting an uphill battle to push the Voting Rights Act through Congress. But shortly after the historic Voting Rights March had ended, she was shot in the head and killed by a car full of Klansmen, while driving on a deserted highway. Viola Liuzzo was a 39-year-old Detroit teamster's wife and mother of five, who joined thousands of people converging in Selma, Alabama for the march on Montgomery, led by Martin Luther King in 1965. ![]() Told through the eyes of her children, the film follows the on-going struggle of an American family to survive the consequences of their mother's heroism and the mystery behind her killing. Short-Listed for Best Documentary Feature, Academy Awards®, HOME OF THE BRAVE is about the only white woman murdered in the civil rights movement and why we hear so little about her. ![]()
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