Word: liuzzo
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Lowndes County. In the slave-built county courthouse at Hayneville last fall, separate trials only weeks apart resulted in acquittals for Special Deputy Tom Coleman, charged with the shot gun slaying of Episcopal Seminarian Jonathan Daniels, and Ku Klux Klansman Collie Leroy Wilkins, accused of murdering Viola Liuzzo, another northern civil rights worker...
...year before he was arrested for the nightrider slaying of Mrs. Viola Liuzzo near Selma last March, Alabama Klansman Collie Leroy Wilkins was riding around with a sawed-off shotgun in his car. Stopped by the cops in Hueytown, near Birmingham, Wilkins pleaded guilty to violating a 1934 federal law designed to curb gangsters, which requires registration of such weapons. After a not-too-inquiring probation officer reported that he had a blameless character and Birmingham Federal Judge Clarence Allgood himself decided that Collie's mother "is a real good woman...
Selma is not in that district. So after two Alabama juries had failed to convict Wilkins, 22, on murder charges, and a federal court had found him guilty of conspiring to violate the constitutional rights of civil rights workers in the Liuzzo slaying,* Judge Allgood last week sentenced Wilkins to a year and a day in prison, his original term on the firearms charge...
...fellow Klansmen convicted with Wilkins in the civil rights case, Eugene Thomas, 42, and William Orville Eaton, 41, also face trial for murder in Mrs. Liuzzo's slaying. Thomas is under indictment as well for violating the federal firearms...
Immediately after the conspiracy convictions in Alabama, Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach telephoned the news to Lyndon Johnson at his Texas ranch. The President had taken a special interest in the case and had even announced on television the trio's arrest the day after Mrs. Liuzzo died. He warned the Ku Klux Klan then that he would bring it to heel. After talking to Katzenbach, Johnson said: "The whole nation can take heart from the fact that there are those in the South who believe in justice in racial matters and are determined not to stand for acts...