The ordinary death of an extraordinary civil rights icon

August 13, 2024

Almost 60 years after dashing into the history books as a terrified teenager in one of the civil rights era’s most infamous killings, Leroy Moton died quietly last September at age 78.

Almost no one noticed.

In 2019, I interviewed Moton, who had been a bespectacled Alabama high-schooler the night he survived the 1965 Ku Klux Klan shooting of Viola Liuzzo, the only White woman slain in the civil rights movement. He described how hours after marching from Selma to Montgomery with Martin Luther King Jr. and 25,000 other protesters, he was riding back to Selma with Liuzzo in the passenger seat of her Oldsmobile when a carload of White men spotted them. Infuriated to see a young Black man with the blonde nursing student, they fired into the car, which swerved and crashed. Knocked unconscious, Moton awakened in the darkness beside Liuzzo’s motionless body. Fearing the killers were nearby, he sprinted in work boots through murky farmland and ran briefly back to the car before tearing onto the deserted highway. Finally he flagged down a Selma-bound truck filled with weary marchers that took him to safety.

Leroy Moton looks back at the killing that changed the civil rights movement

Liuzzo’s murder was so highly publicized that it astonished even me — an Indiana fourth-grader shocked that the brutes murdering “Negro” activists down south had actually killed a White woman. Liuzzo’s death left her five children motherless, her Teamsters executive husband devastated, and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover busy inventing salacious falsehoods to discredit Liuzzo, 39, and Moton, and to distract people from the fact that one of his undercover agents had been in the car with her killer. Yet the most consequential impact of Liuzzo’s slaying was that it inspired Congress to pass the stalled Voting Rights Act of 1965. Five days after her death, King, future congressman John Lewis, Teamsters President Jimmy Hoffa and 350 others crowded into a Detroit parish for her funeral.

Fifty-eight years later, fewer than 40 mourners gathered at a funeral home in Hartford, Conn., on Sept. 22 to memorialize Moton.

Several rows of pews were empty. The obscurity of Moton’s funeral, a week after his death from cancer, felt “tragic” to Lisa Nkonoki, a Black Hartford-area public relations professional whom funeral director Howard K. Hill contacted after receiving Moton’s body. “He called me and said, ‘I think I have someone here of some note,’” Nkonoki says. After learning more about Moton’s largely forgotten history, Nkonoki “felt sick that this man hadn’t been honored more.”

Six decades is a long time. Long enough for that fleet, 19-year-old runner‘s work boots to be replaced by gray Skechers that Moton wore to shuffle his still-lanky 6-foot-4 frame behind a metal walker. Long enough for him to marry, divorce, father a beloved son bearing his name, and to register voters in Illinois, Michigan, and Georgia before settling in Hartford in 1969 to become a machinery company foreman. Long enough for Moton to realize that for as long he lived, he would feel haunted by Liuzzo’s death — “Time was, I wished it was me instead of her. She had five kids.” — and be terrified while driving down dark, two-lane highways. The attack remained “fresh in his mind,” says Moton’s namesake, Leroy Jr., 35, a Stamford television production manager. “He said he thought about it every day.”

Most surprisingly, six decades was long enough for the Voting Rights Act — now established law whose passage Moton spent his entire adult life being proud of — to be threatened. On Nov. 20, a federal appeals court ruled that only the federal government — not private citizens and civil rights groups as is customary — are allowed to sue under a key section of the landmark civil rights law. Considering that about 90 percent of successful lawsuits under the act are brought by private plaintiffs and groups, the decision effectively deals a death blow to the historic legislation in seven states. Almost certain to be appealed, the ruling will probably end up in the Supreme Court.

In many ways, it makes sense that Moton — once a bright but unremarkable teen who after his brush with fame lived a full but unremarkable life — would pass without fanfare. “I would have been shocked had it not happened that way,” says Russ Wigginton, president of the National Civil Rights Museum, housed in the historic Lorraine Motel, where King was assassinated.

Wigginton had heard of Moton but only learned of his death when I informed him of it. In his view, Moton’s common-man status “makes his early sacrifice more meaningful.” In speeches, Wiggington often reminds people that most seismic societal change isn’t wrought by icons such as King and Gandhi, but by “everyday people whose ordinariness made their actions more powerful.” A longtime educator, he says that “explaining to young people how regular folks did some of the [courageous] things they did creates a really empowering mind-set. It teaches them that people who seem ordinary may have done extraordinary things.”

Moton’s namesake couldn’t agree more. The singular moment foisted on his dad “could’ve happened to anybody,” he says. “The movement was just regular people collectively trying to make a difference.” Though his father was “very modest,” he continues, that doesn’t mean he didn’t enjoy talking about his days in the struggle. “People he’d meet, if he got into a long conversation, he’d bring up working with Jesse [Jackson], MLK, the marches,” Moton Jr. says.

Interviewing the elder Moton, I found him thoughtful and accommodating. Yet it was difficult for him to explain what I most wanted to understand: What was it like, crafting a second act after being catapulted at age 19 into your life’s defining moment? Many of us know of gifted student-athletes whose glory days ended at graduation, who struggled over engaging the world in the decades left to them. But athletes spend years training to be ready for whatever big moment awaits them. How does one prepare to become the inadvertent sidekick to a martyr?

Surviving that ink-black night allowed Moton to slide back into the comforting normalcy denied to civil rights heroes such as King, Emmett Till and Liuzzo — victims frozen not just in time, but also in our imaginations. Who might they have become? Sidestepping martyrdom, Moton got to embrace all that’s extraordinary about ordinary life — cheering favorite teams, guffawing at family gatherings, gasping over July Fourth fireworks, falling in and out of love, crying at kids’ graduations, and perhaps evolving into someone you never dreamed you could become.

As his notoriety faded, the elder Moton seemed unfazed by people forgetting the horror he survived, including the terror any Black Southerner would have felt testifying in 1965 at four trials against a quartet of White men in Liuzzo’s killing (two received 10-year prison sentences). What did trouble him was folks taking for granted what his and other activists’ efforts produced: more equality for all Americans and the lesson that those rights deserve appreciation and protection. When it became clear last summer that the legislation Liuzzo’s death had spurred was endangered, neither Moton Jr. nor his dad quite believed it. “We agreed it kind of defeated the purpose of what my dad did in 1965,” Moton Jr. says. “It’s mind-boggling that in 2023 we appear to be going backward.”

Going backward wasn’t his dad’s style. Moton, despite radiating a distinctly old-school Southern gentlemanliness, often seemed surprisingly youthful. A fan of video games, sporting events and McDonald’s despite being an excellent cook whose fried chicken, collard greens, and mac and cheese friends described as “mouthwatering,” he was “the life of the party,” according to his best buddy. That’s impressive considering that she happens to have been 30 years his junior.

“When they say age is nothing but a number, with Leroy it was really true,” says Amy Hurt, 38, a Willimantic, Conn., nurse trainer who met him when she was 16. Hurt, whose mom was a church acquaintance of Moton’s, ran into him at a gas station, where “we started talking and just hit it off.” Their vast age difference “made some people think [the friendship] was weird,” she recalls. But she found him inspiring and over the years appreciated the wealth of life experiences his maturity gave him to share — and not just with her. “He took care of my kids like they were his grandkids, insisting they must go to college, be on the honor roll. … We’d all go to games, cookouts, birthday parties … play NBA 2K, everything.”

In 2014 Hurt’s house caught fire. She was standing outside crying, “wanting to fall into a hole,” when Moton arrived. He told her, “‘Look, this stuff happens to people,’” she recalls. “I’m standing there watching my house burn, but he wouldn’t let me break down. Reminding me that no matter what, life is good. He always stayed positive.”

Indeed, I felt Leroy’s optimism in texts he sent me years after I wrote about him. Out of the blue, he would check in to say hi, or to wish me a happy Mother’s Day or Thanksgiving. I was saddened to learn of his passing too late to send flowers to his funeral or a message expressing my gratitude to him for having been someone who demonstrably left the world a better place than he found it.

Deaths such as Moton’s are a painful reminder to Wigginton that even the youngest activists of the 1950s and ’60s are passing on, even as old threats resurface. “There’s a particular sense of urgency right now around capturing these stories … so young people can really see their relevance,” Wigginton says. “We must utilize the power of these narratives to connect with the present-day equivalent. We can say, ‘Tyre Nichols, who was killed here in Memphis [last year] and George Floyd aren’t that different from Emmett Till. Or Viola Liuzzo.’”

In the weeks after Moton’s sparsely attended funeral, a different sense of urgency filled Nkonoki. After meeting several Hartford residents who remembered Liuzzo’s murder but hadn’t heard of the soft-spoken local man who could have died with her, she contacted the state’s Martin Luther King Jr. Holiday Commission. “Viola Liuzzo was definitely a hero,” Nkonoki explained. “Leroy’s life was spared, but at what cost? Being forever traumatized by that night? Hearing people dishonor his sacrifice by pretending like he’d had a relationship with Viola? Having his contribution get swept under the rug?”

On Martin Luther King Jr. Day, more than 100 people gathered in the state Capitol for a holiday celebration of Moton and several other Connecticut peace activists. Among the attendees: U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) and Hartford Mayor Arunan Arulampalam. When Stephanie Thomas, Connecticut’s first Black secretary of state, entreated listeners to value and protect voting, Nkonoki felt a chill. No issue had been more important to Moton.

Wigginton knows the feeling. “How do we get young people to think about voting as a powerful tool that they have?” he asks. “Political candidates focus their time, energy and resources on people who vote consistently, and who have the most money to contribute,” he explained. “Young people don’t belong to either group, so their needs get ignored. If 18- to 24-year-olds increased their turnout by just 10 percent, they would see the incredible power [voting] gives them.”

I will never forget how Moton’s face lit up while describing the intoxication of discovering his own personal agency through activism. How empowering it felt, watching years of forced kowtowing to White people evaporate as thousands of souls, Black and White, descended upon Selma to dismantle Jim Crow. Instantly, his hometown transformed from a place of danger and limitation into a landscape of possibility. “We kids wasn’t afraid no more,” he told me. “We wasn’t afraid to say ‘No,’ and ‘Yes,’ [to White people] instead of ‘No, sir,’ and ‘Yes, sir.’ We didn’t sit in the back seat anymore … or go to the back door. All that fear left.”

Today, Wigginton says, “few young people know that most of the freedom riders were college students.” Reminding them of their latent power is the work of every older person who remembers because “voting rights simply don’t matter to most 18- to 24-year-olds. … They’re not thinking about it.”

That they should be thinking about it was a no-brainer for Moton, who had spent six decades reflecting on that sacred right. The empowered teen turned reflective elder told me that whenever someone complained to him about then-President Donald Trump’s actions, he had one question for them: “Did you vote?” If they responded that voting is useless because politicians do whatever they want, he would calmly remind them, “You can change things,” before adding what he knew better than anyone:

“People gave their lives so you can vote.”

Donna Britt, a former Washington Post columnist, is the author of “Brothers (and Me): A Memoir of Loving and Giving.”

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