17 Years Later, Marchers Retrace the Bloody Route of History News Clipping

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A2 T~u,.dov. f,.hruorv 18. 1082 THE WASHINGTON POST 

17 Years Later, Marchers Retrace the Bloody Route of ·History 
By Art Harris 

Wa.<hingU>n Post SIMI Writer 

HAYNEVILLE, Ala., Feb. 17-
The civil rights marchers were com­
ing his way again, but there was 
nothing the old man couJd do about 
it this time. A squad of state troop­
ers was riding shotgun, shepherding 
the weary marchers through the roll­
ing farmland of Lowndes County, 
notorious for its bloody past. The 
only heckling had come from truck­
ers over CB radios, with a few ob­
scene gestures from passing pickups. 

Tom Coieman, 72, hunched for­
ward in a living room chair, leaning 
close to the police scanner that 
crackled with news of 70 demonstra­
tors trekking along Highway 80 on 
the final Selma-to-Montgomery leg 
of a march to protest voting discrim­
ination in the South. 

It was 17 years after the Voting 
Rights Act had been signed into law, 
and the bedraggled marchers were 
retracing the- steps of the historic 
1965 march that left three civil 
rights workers dl)ad and many 
bklodied, but helped give birth to 
the landmark legislation. 

"There's no need for a march," 
said Coleman, a retired-state high­
way engineer. "They got a four-to­
one [black] majority in Lo\vndes 
County now. Nobody's turned down 
to vote any more." 

The Voting Rights Act has 
worked miracles In Lowndes County, 
Ala., where Coleman h~ lived qui­
etly ever since he stood trial for the 
shooting of two civil rights workers 
17 years ago jwt off the town 
square. An all-white jury acquitted 
him of charges that he killed Jona­
than Daniels, 26, an Episcopal sem­
inary student, and wounded a priest. 

The trial took place in the same 
courthou..<;e where three Ku Klux 
Klansmen were acquitted of murder­
ing Viola Liuzzo, a civil rights work­
er and Detroit mother, just up the 
road. The Klansmen were convicted 
of her murder in federal court. 

A week after Liuzzo's death, on 
March 25, 1965, President Johnson · 
signed the Voting Rights Act into 
law. At the time, Lowndes County 
was 80 percent black, but had no 
blacks on its jury rolls or in any 
county office. 

Now a black sh4'riff, John Hullett, 
rides the back .roads. F'our out of five 
county commissioners are black. So 
are the tax assessor, tax collector, 
sc~ board superintendent and 
other officials. 

"It was the last county in Alabama 
to register blacks," Charles Smith, 
the black county commissioner, rem­
inisced. "Blacks couldn't use the 
public schools they were taxed to 
pay for. Now we have the key to the 
schools and the jailhouse. In fact, the 
jail is the most hospitable place in 
Lowndes County." 

But civil rights leaders say there 
are places all across the South where 
blacks are discouraged from flexing 
their political muscle in 1982, 
through tactics more subtle than 
bullets. They point to Pickens Coun­
ty, where Maggie Bozeman, 51, and 
Julia Wilder, 69, were convicted of 
illegally helping elderly blacks fill 
out absentee ballots in a 1978 coun­
ty election. An all-white jilly gave 
the two black women what is be­
lieved to be the stiffest sentences 
ever handed down in an Alabama 
voting fraud case. 

The Rev. Joseph Lowery, presi­
dent of the Atlanta-based Southern 
Christian Leadership Conference, 
organized this march to protest their 
sentences, urge Gov. Fob James to 
lean on the pardons and paroles 
board to free them and urge Con­
gress to extend the Voting Rights 
Act. The marchers set out from 
Pickens County Feb. 6, and are ex­
pected to walk into Montgomery 
Thursday for a rally at the Capitol. 

The marchers have sparked none 
of the violence that marked the 1965 
voting registration march from Sel­
ma, only the grumblings of ghosts 
from that era. Any black who wants 
to vote, says Coleman, "ought . to 
know how to read .and write. Ought 
to at least know who they're voting 
for." Most blacks here don't hold 
grudges ag8inst men like Tom .Cole­
man. 

"We're gonna let the good Lord 
take care of him," said Frank Miles, 
50, a black county commissioner. 
"We've learned not to try to pay 
back what they've done to us. We 
don't have enough time." 

To some old-timers, Coleman re-

Auto Dealers' Money 
Adds Octane to Drive 
Against FTC Regulation 

By Paul Taylor 
W:ll>hmgton Post Starr Wrili!r 

As recently as eight years ago the 
political action committee of the Na­
tional Automobile Dealers Associa­
tion was raising and doling out about 
$40,000 per congressional election: 

In the 1980 election it contributed 
$1,034,875 ·to congressional candi­
·dat.es, making it fourth-largest 
among the nation's 2,901 PACs. 

At least one reason for this Jack­
and-the-beanstalk growth is a used 
car regulation the Federal Trade 
Commission adopted last year, and 
which the NADA wants Congress to 
kill. 

The rule, adopted by the FTC / 
after a five-year study of misrepre­
sentations by used car dealers, wouJd 
require a sticker listing "known de­
fects" to be placed on all dealer-sold 
used cars. 

The dealers say such a require­
ment would be the height of "bu­
reaucratic arrogance," in the words 
of Wendell Miller, president of their 
19,000-member association. 

Two years ago Congress voted it­
self the power to scuttle FTC reg­
ulations with the two-house veto. 
NADA is now asking members to 
make the used car rule the first test 
of that procedure. Other industry 
groups are watching closely to see if, 
as many say they believe, legislators 
will prove more sympathetic to busi­
ness than to regulators. 

PACs are one rea5on for this be­
lief. NADA's 1980 campaign contri­
butions of more than $1 million has 
assured it at least an attentive hear­
ing on Capitol Hill, where it claims 
that the FTC's rule wouJd put a 
crimp in the only part of the de­
pressed car m~ket now keeping 
many dealerships alive. 

No one suggests that .the political 
contributions, typically given in 
chunks of $1,000 to $5,000, have 
bought any votes, but a clear corre­
lation exists between the dealers' 
campaign giving and congressional 
opposition to the FTC rule. 

In the House, of 216 co-sponsors 
of a veto resolution, 180, or 84 per­
cent, reeeived c.ontributions in the 
1980 campaign and the first six 
months of 1981 from NADA. 

Members of Congress who got 
money from the NADA were three 
times u likely to have co-sponsored 
the resolution as those who got none, 
according to flgUl'es compiled by 
Congress W at.ch, the consumer ad­
vocate group founded by Ralph 
Nader. 

The correlation is even more dis­
tinct within the House Energy and 
Commerce Committee, which ap­
proved the veto resolution in Decem­
ber. Of the 27 membl)rs ~bo sup-

ported the veto, 26 received a total 
of $87,600 in campaign contributions 
from NADA. Of the 14 who voted 
no, six received a total of $8,350 in 
NADA money. 

. · A similar though less distinctive 
pattern holds in the Senate, where a 
veto resolution has 46 co-sponsors. 

"This is one issue where I'm afraid 
it looks like campaign contributions 
just have had an impact," said Sen. 
Slade Gorton (R-Wash.), one of a 
group of llilpublicans in the Senate 
op~ing the industry position. 

Gorton, a former state attorney 
general who often grappled with con­
sumer complaints about used cars, 
said he thinks the dealers lobby has 
skillfully taken advantage of the ac­
cess that comes with campaign con­
tributions. 

For its part, NADA prides itself 
on its aggressiveness. 

''We're not trying to influence pol­
icy, we're trying to influence elec­
tions," said Frank E. McCarthy, 
NADA executive vice president. "We 
just want to get the right objective 
players here in Washington so our 
grass-roots efforts can have an im­
pact." 

NADA is careful to aid both Dem­
ocrats and Republicans, and that 
policy has paid off. Despite their 
general tilt toward the consumer side 
of issues, Democrats, with the nota­
ble exception of Rep. James J. Florio 
(D-N.J.), have chosen not to make 
much of an issue of the used car con­
sumer protection bill. 

In the Senate Commerce, Science 
and Transportation Committee, all 
eight Democratic members sup­
ported the industry position in a 14-
to-4 vote in favor of the veto. 

The ranking Democrat on that 
committee is Wendell H. Ford of 
Kentucky, who received $5,000 from 
NADA and who, as chairman of the 
Democratic Senatorial Campaign 
Committee, is responsible for seeing 
to it that his party's Senate cam­
paigns are adequately funded. 

Committee Chairman Bob Pack­
wood (R-Ore.), who . heads the Na­
tional Republican Senatorial Com­
mittee, got $3,000 from NADA. But 
he was a staunch opponent of the 
veto resolution, and wed a parlia- · 
mentary device in December that 
kept the issue from reaching the 
floor. His strategy was designed to 
give the consumer lobby some time 
to build a head of steam. 

The two lead spOnsors of the res­
olution, Gary A. Lee (R-N.Y.) in the 
House and Larry Pressler (R-S.D.) 
in the Senate, have reintroduced 
their veto resolutions, and say they 
have detected no slackening of sup­
port. Congress has 90 legislative days 
to act. 

Tony Liuzzo places a wreath at the site 
Klansmen and shot to death in 1965 for her 

mains a quiet hero. To others, he is a 
living reminder of a bloody past that 
could return, they say, if Congress 
doesn't send a clear message to the 
heartland by extending the Voting 
Rights Act. 

c-#..:J 

They walked by day and rallied in 
black churches by night, singing "We 
Shall Overcome," and chanting, 
"Reagan, Reagan, he's no good, send 
him back to Hollywood." 

Along the way they slept in homes 
and churches. Some, like Odessa 
Warrick, 56, a black rnother of three 

As.<ac1at.ed Press 

his mother, Viola, was chased by four 
rights activities in lAwndes Coonty. 

Tuscaloosa, were veterans of a 
Jar march in 1965, when about 
blacks came face to face with 

Old South on the Edmund Pet-
Bridge outside Sebna. 

"I was beat, kicked and dragged 
" Warrick said. "They threw 

ocks at us and called us niggers. 
en to jail 13 times: But no one's 

een hit with billy clubs this time. I 
.ind of miss those jails." 

She was delighted at the prospect 
f defying the Montgomery City 
. ouncil Thursday and attempting to 

h the entire length of h~storic 

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Dexter Avenue, past the first church 
of slain civil rights leader Martin 
Luther King Jr. The council, on a 
5-to-4 split along racial lines, decid­
ed to limit the marchers to two 
blocks on Dexter. 

the sun died and her children were 
the planets and they drifted off into 
space," he said. 

Two beer cans marked the spot 
where she was killed, and as he came 
up a hill in the rain tears were 
streaming down his face_ One after 
another, marchers placed palm 
crosses on a muddy hillside, then 
Tony planted a plastic heart of red 
and white carnations on the spot 
where his mother had died. He faced 
the crowd. 

"We want to retrace our steps," 
Lowery told the marchers today as 
they reached the outskirts of Mont­
gomery. "The historic route of Dex­
ter Avenue to the Capitol is part of 
the civil rights movement. that led to 
the voting rights act." 

"Ain't gonna let the jailhouse turn 
me around!" they chanted. "Gonna 
keep on marching down freedom's 
road!" 

"It's a difficult moment for me," 
he said quietly. uBut the spirit of my 
mother and Dr. King, and evNy 
brave soul who laid .down thei.r life 
for freedom lives inside us today_ We 
will pick up their tracks." 

c-#..:J 

To dramatize the issue, the SCLC 
flew down Tony Liuzzo, 26, a part­
time school bus driver from Detroit 
who was only 10 when Klan 
nightriders gunned down his mother 
outside of town. 

The sun came out as the marchers 
walked on down the highway. 

"I was asleep when my father got 
the call," said Liuzzo, trudging along 
the highway. "I .remember hearing 
my sister screaming, 'Momma's 
dead! Momma's dead!' I thought it 
was a nightmare, then I woke up and 
found out it was a living nightmare," 

Corrections 
The expiration date for 

Western Airlines' new Wash­
ington-to-California fare was 
listed incorrectly in a 
"Roundup" column item in 
yesterday's Business & Fi­
nance section. The correct 
date is March 31. In another 
item, about Norfolk & West­
ern .Railway's purchase of 
locomotives, the $1 million 
cost should have referred to • 
each unit. 

Four Klansmen had chased her 
powder blue Oldsmobile through the 
darkness at 100 mph before pulling 
alongside and pumping 25 shots into 
her car. ·FBI informer Gary Thomas · 
Rowe was cruising with . the 
nightriders, and testified against 
them as the key prosecution witness 
when they were convicted in federal 
court of violating the 39-year-old 
woman's civil rights. 

c-#..:J 

Marianne W. Fowler, of 
Alexandria, a supporter of 
the Equal Rights Amend­
ment who was arrested at the 
Virginia State Capitol in 
1978, was convicted in Rich­
mond General District Court 
of charges of trespassing and 
assault on a police officer. 
When she exercised her right 
to a new trial in a Virginia 
Circuit Court, the court dis­
missed the charges. An ar­
ticle in last Thursday's Post 
failed to note that the con­
victions had been wiped out 
and the charges dismissed . 

But published reports said Rowe 
had taken part in violent crimes with 
the Klansmen while working as an 
FBI informer in Birmingham. 

The Liuzzo family, angry over the 
FBI's questionable role in handling 
its informer, sued for $2 million in 
damages, claiming that the FBI was 
responsible for her death. An inter­
nal Justice Department investigation 
found no basis to discipline FBI 
agents in the matter. 

"Even if we win the lawsuit- ! 
don't care if it's for $150 million­
l'd rather have my mother back," 
said Liuzzo. 

"When she was killed, it was like 

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