For son Tony, the notion of constitutional freedom for all has taken a more troubling permutation he is now a high-ranking member of the Michigan Militia, distrustful of authorities and carrying a firearm wherever he goes.Įldest son Tommy, meanwhile, has completely disappeared into the backwoods of Alabama, not far from where his mother took her fateful last ride.
For middle daughter Mary, this means the retracing of her mother’s footsteps that provides “Home of the Brave” with its basic structure. Di Florio, however, digs deeper into the psyches of those left behind, building her film, like Andrew Jarecki’s “Capturing the Friedmans.”Īs di Florio finds, the gruesome instant of Liuzzo’s murder is one in which Liuzzo’s children are forever trapped. Such matters may never be satisfactorily answered, and many filmmakers might have been content to let the story rest. Edgar Hoover was personally responsible for engineering a smear campaign against Liuzzo’s moral character? Why, for example, was Rowe also suspected of participation in the infamous firebombing of Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church? Why was the FBI’s file on Liuzzo’s case three times the size of its file on the KKK at the height of the civil rights movement? And, perhaps most disconcerting, why is there documentation in that file to suggest J. Some 10 years later, new evidence emerged suggesting that Rowe himself, then immune from prosecution as the result of a deal made with the government, may in fact have been the trigger man.ĭocu presents a mesmerizing true-life murder mystery, as di Florio offers compelling evidence, collected by the Liuzzos over the past three decades, which suggests the official story surrounding their mother’s death may have been just that - a fiction. Afterward, a federal court convicted them of civil rights violations. Though Rowe would subsequently identify the other suspects and testify against them in court, an all-white state jury acquitted the men of murder. Her assailants were a carload of KKK members, including an undercover FBI informant, Gary Thomas Rowe. This was something the strong-willed Liuzzo felt she had to do, and her family knew objections would be futile.Ī week later, Liuzzo was dead, fatally wounded in a drive-by shooting as she was transporting a black man, Leroy Moton, in her vehicle. Her skills as a nurse and ambulance driver would be needed. Two weeks later, Liuzzo was headed South to participate in King’s four-day march on Montgomery. A 39-year-old wife of a Detroit Teamster official and mother of five, Liuzzo, like many white Americans, had her eyes opened to the full intensity of the troubles in the South on Bloody Sunday - Mawhen some 600 civil rights marchers were attacked by police on Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge.
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