Viola Liuzzo Park

01 / The story of this place

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Detroit created Viola Liuzzo Park on the city's northwest side in the 1970s to honor Liuzzo, a Detroit housewife and civil rights activist shot and killed by Ku Klux Klan members in Alabama on March 25, 1965. She had driven down from Detroit that March to help after watching news coverage of the attack on marchers at Selma's Edmund Pettus Bridge, and she spent her final days ferrying activists between Selma and Montgomery during the historic voting rights march before Klansmen shot her on a rural highway. In 2019, the park added a statue showing Liuzzo walking barefoot with a Klan hood lying on the ground behind her. In September 2023, it unveiled a second monument honoring both Liuzzo and Sarah Evans, the Black family friend who cared for Liuzzo's five children while she was in Alabama; the granite marker reads "Sisters in Life — Sisters in Struggle." The park remains an active neighborhood green space today.

1. Park created in the 1970s to honor Viola Liuzzo
2. Liuzzo was murdered by Klansmen in Alabama in March 1965
3. Statue of Liuzzo, unveiled in 2019, shows her with a Klan hood at her feet
4. A second monument to Liuzzo and Sarah Evans was unveiled in 2023