Say what you want about former Teamster President Jimmy Hoffa, but he did have enough class to attend the Detroit funeral of Viola Liuzzo, assassinated on a rural Alabama highway. Sixty-two years is a long time ago on March 30 when he joined 350 mourners to grieve for wife of a Teamster official.

Liuzzo was driving on U.S. 80 from Selma, Alabama, when a car pulled up beside her and one of its occupants fired point-blank into her face. She was not in that southern state for Teamster business: she was there to help correct a wrong, not one perpetrated by a President but by legislators and her fellow Americans.

In 1964 she, along with millions of other Americans, watched on television the horror happening in the South on Bloody Sunday, March 7; the next day she decided to drive from Detroit to go to Selma. On Sunday, March 21, she joined 3,000 other marchers as, five abreast; they marched across the infamously named Pettus Bridge, across the Alabama River in Selma. (Built in 1940, it still bears the name of Edmund Pettus, a former Confederate brigadier general, U.S. senator, and state-level leader -- Grand Dragon – of the Alabama Ku Klux Klan.) Fourteen days before the site gave the name Bloody Sunday to March 7.

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On March 24 Liuzzo stayed overnight at St. Jude's, a complex of buildings including a Catholic Church, hospital and school, just inside the Montgomery city limits. From the church tower she watched the approach of 25,000 marchers. When she came down from the tower, she told one of the parish priests, "I have a feeling of apprehension. Something is going to happen today. Someone is going to be killed."

Calmer after prayer, she joined the marchers for the last four miles to the capitol building in Montgomery. With everyone else she sang freedom songs and listened to the speeches. When the march was over, Liuzzo met civil rights worker Leroy Moton, who had been using her car all day as an airport shuttle. The two of them drove five passengers back to Selma – about the same distance as Boston to Worcester. When they were dropped off, Viola volunteered to return Moton to Montgomery. Harassed by others on the trip back to the state capital, their car was trailed by members of the Ku Klux Klan – Collie Wilkins, Jr., William Eaton, and Eugene Thomas – who spotted Liuzzo and Moton at a traffic light in Selma. They followed her car for twenty miles. About half-way between Selma and Montgomery the men pulled their car up next to hers and shot her. Liuzzo was killed instantly, thus becoming the only white woman (that we know of) to die in the Civil Rights movement. Her car crashed into a ditch, while Moton escaped relatively uninjured.

In 2002, nearly forty years after their deaths, a Selma Memorial plaque, honoring the high school drop-out Viola Liuzzo and two other heroes of the Civil Rights movement, Jimmy Lee Jackson and James Reeb, was dedicated at the Unitarian Universalist Association's Boston headquarters building at 25 Beacon Street. The next time you’re downtown, take a look and say a prayer in thanks for what the three accomplished.