Coming next.

Raised in the Jim Crow South, Viola Liuzzo was keenly aware of the injustices suffered by African Americans. As a member of the NAACP, she joined in protests for equal rights in her adopted city of Detroit. In 1 964, she walked in the shadow of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as he led a march through downtown. His call to action, coupled with TV coverage of Bloody Sunday, prompted her to leave her husband and five children to travel to Selma, Alabama.

There, she marched again--with thousands of others--across the Edmund Pettus Bridge and on to Montgomery. On March 25, 1965, as she helped shuttle participants back to their destinations, she was murdered by a group of Ku Klux Klansmen. Her death, and those of two other activists, was considered to be an impetus for the passage of the federal Voting Rights Act.