Abstract
Both the Martin Luther King Jr.–led Selma voting rights campaign of 1965 and the 2017 “Summer of Hate” in Charlottesville produced a white female martyr. Viola Liuzzo was murdered by KKK members at the end of the Selma‐to‐Montgomery march that culminated the Selma campaign. Heather Heyer was murdered in a terrorist car attack by a neo‐Nazi at the end of the suspended “Unite the Right” rally. Both women were hailed in the press as heroes. Both were misogynistically attacked in white supremacist media—in ways that were almost identical. How can we understand the media representation of white women as racial justice activists and the ways white supremacists understand them in their media platforms? What about the media treatment of African American women activists in Selma and Charlottesville? What's changed, and what hasn't, in fifty years? What can this comparative case study suggest about how the media tends to portray white women and women of color in other social change movements?
Selma, 1965 / Charlottesville, 2017
These two small southern cities, separated by half a century, have both come to signify the struggle against racism and white supremacy in the United States. Both received massive amounts of media attention to the point that the towns’ names entered into the lexicon as verbal shorthand: “Selma” representing not just a specific campaign of the Martin Luther King Jr.–led campaign for Black voting rights in 1965 that led directly to the passage of the landmark Voting Rights Act but, more generally, the entire civil rights movement; “Charlottesville” signifying not just the violent “Unite the Right” rally, ostensibly organized to protest the town's desire to remove Confederate monuments but the rise of a visible, violent, and empowered white nationalist “alt-right” in the age of Trump. As international media events, they drew television reporters and cameras, photojournalists, and a vast array of each period's media outlets to the clashes between white supremacist forces, the antiracist activists who opposed them, and the aftermath of the confrontations.
Two men and one woman died violently during the Selma campaign; numerous activists were badly injured. The Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, in an odd symmetry, also resulted in the deaths of two men and one woman, along with dozens of injured activists. And in both cases, the female victim, a thirty-something white woman, got the majority of the media's attention. In 1965, the white female victim was further victimized by a campaign of virulently misogynistic commentary from white supremacists that managed to seep into mainstream media coverage. In 2017, similar misogyny from alt-right figures on social media spewed forth, but the mainstream media response was very different. In this article, I want to explore how mainstream media framed these two white women as martyrs who died for the cause of opposing white supremacy.1 Fifty years and a transformative liberal feminist movement, as well as a markedly different media landscape, separated Viola Liuzzo from Heather Heyer. How and why were they treated as they were in media coverage? How and why did white supremacist media discourse manage to victimize Liuzzo further but not Heyer? In the wake of intersectional feminism and the Black Lives Matter movement, which separate Liuzzo's era from Heyer's, how can we understand the ways mass media has continued to elevate the white female victim while marginalizing the violence done to Black women activists?
Selma and Viola
The voting rights campaign had been going on in Selma, Alabama, with leadership from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) as well as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and local activists, for over a month in early 1965. Media interest had been sporadic, with attention paid mostly whenever the openly racist local sheriff Jim Clark and his ragtag posse acted out violently against nonviolent African Americans who regularly gathered en masse at the county courthouse in vain attempts to register to vote. There had been no galvanizing spectacle as there had been in Birmingham two years previously, when that town's racist public safety commissioner Bull Connor set loose police dogs and high-powered fire hoses on young people in the SCLC's “children's crusade” marches against segregated public facilities. But then on Sunday, March 7, in protest against the recent killing of a local voting rights activist, Jimmie Lee Jackson, the SCLC proposed a march from Selma to the Montgomery state capitol, to bring the Black disenfranchisement protest to Governor George Wallace's doorstep. As marchers crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge out of Selma, they met Wallace's state troopers, and in front of assembled TV cameras and news photographers, the troopers plowed over the nonviolent marchers, tear-gassing, beating, and brutalizing them. Footage of the spectacular violence on the Edmund Pettus Bridge made it to prime-time television that evening. Approximately forty-nine million Americans were tuned in to ABC for its Sunday Night at the Movies broadcast of the Hollywood blockbuster Judgment at Nuremburg (dir. Stanley Kramer, US, 1961). The network's news division interrupted the program with its special report from Selma.2
In that era of only three nationwide television viewing options and no twenty-four-hour news channels to handle breaking news stories, vast numbers of viewers engaged with the same programming: in this case the sudden shifting from a fictional narrative about Nazi brutality toward Jews to a nonfictional account of Southern white supremacist brutality against Black people. The broadcast, because it happened in such a popular TV-viewing time slot and because it juxtaposed Nazi and segregationist violence, galvanized hundreds of people around the country to make the spontaneous decision to journey to Selma and stand with the beaten and gassed marchers. Viola Liuzzo was one of the hundreds.
A thirty-nine-year-old wife, mother of five, and part-time student from Detroit, Liuzzo saw the infamous news film and made a snap decision to get into her car, leaving her husband and family behind. During her days in Selma, she worked with the local activists and participated in the culmination of the Selma campaign: the triumphant five-day Selma-to-Montgomery march with thousands assembling in front of the state capitol to hear Dr. King deliver one of his greatest speeches. Participating in that now legendary march, Liuzzo spent the immediate aftermath ferrying marchers back to Selma from Montgomery in her car. On a final run, accompanied by a nineteen-year-old Black male fellow activist, Leroy Moton, Liuzzo was ambushed and murdered on Highway 80. The now dark and lonely highway had only recently been peopled with hundreds of singing and American-flag-holding voting rights marchers, clergy, students, and many, many reporters. A car filled with Klansmen—one an FBI informant—sidled up next to her car after Liuzzo had fruitlessly tried to outrace them. A shotgun blast killed her almost instantly. Moton, spattered with her blood, pretended to be dead.3
Charlottesville and Heather
Heather Heyer's killing also involved a car propelled by aggrieved masculinist and white supremacist hatred. The Unite the Right rally culminated months of white nationalist and antiracist organizing and clashes in the bucolic college town of Charlottesville. After an African American high school sophomore started a petition in early 2016 that was taken up by the city's youthful and also African American vice-mayor, Wes Bellamy, to remove the Robert E. Lee statue and rename the downtown park over which it loomed, a match was lit. Jason Kessler, a local white nationalist provocateur, blogger, and University of Virginia alum who wanted to raise his public profile, began inviting individuals associated with the burgeoning alt-right to town in response to the city's split decision to remove the statue. In May 2017, in a portent of what was to come, a group of white nationalists organized an unpermitted surprise nighttime tiki torch rally in Lee Park, spewing Nazi-era chants like “blood and soil.” Two months later, a North Carolina assemblage of Ku Klux Klansmen rallied in Charlottesville's other downtown city park with a Confederate statue of Stonewall Jackson. The four dozen Klansmen faced off against more than a thousand counterprotesters, creating a national media event. The “Summer of Hate,” a term used by Charlottesville antiracist activists to label the racist turbulence of 2017 in their town, reached a culmination first on the evening of August 11, with hundreds of neo-Nazis and alt-right white nationalists marching through the Grounds of the University of Virginia with their tiki torches, chanting “Jews will not replace us,” and violently confronting a small group of antiracist students at a statue of Thomas Jefferson. Then, on August 12, with worldwide, wall-to-wall media coverage, albeit in a more fragmented, partisan, and dispersed environment, the hatred climaxed with the ugly clashes all around the newly renamed Emancipation Park between alt-right forces against nonviolent clergy, laypeople trained in direct action techniques associated with the civil rights era (also more antagonistic antifa groups), and hundreds of townspeople who showed up to protest.4 In the midst of all this were right-wing militia groups armed with assault weapons. While local and Virginia state police looked on, the mayhem spiraled on until, finally, law enforcement declared an unlawful assembly.
Heather Heyer was a thirty-two-year-old paralegal from Charlottesville. Like Liuzzo, Heyer could be described as “blue collar.”5 And like Liuzzo, she had made an impromptu decision to join counter-protesters on August 12 after seeing footage of white supremacist violence. Her friend Courtney Commander had been livestreaming the tiki torch march on University of Virginia (UVA) Grounds. Appalled at what she saw, Heyer decided to join her African American friends and colleagues Courtney and Melissa Blair, texting a friend, “I feel compelled to go, to show solidarity.”6 She was marching with hundreds of antiracist counter-protesters who were celebrating what seemed to be the end of the Unite the Right rally. Then, suddenly, a neo-Nazi accelerated his car across the pedestrian Downtown Mall, deliberately smashing into the crowd, then throwing the car into reverse, injuring more people, before retreating back and away. Heyer was killed almost instantly by blunt force trauma; dozens more were injured, some grievously.7
In Selma, Liuzzo was the third activist to be murdered during the campaign. Before her, a white clergyman, Rev. James Reeb, heeding Martin Luther King Jr.’s call for clergy around the country to come to Selma following Bloody Sunday, had been beaten to death by white racists on the streets of Selma. And before Reeb, Jimmie Lee Jackson, a Black activist from nearby Marion, Alabama, participating in a nighttime voting rights march, had been shot by a state trooper as Jackson tried to shield his mother and his eighty-two-year-old grandfather from troopers’ blows. His death served as the impetus for the march that was so viciously halted on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Jackson's death received a small amount of coverage in the era's mainstream media, with brief mentions on CBS's Evening News with Walter Cronkite. Reeb received far more, including interviews with his wife and condolences from President Johnson. Jackson's family received none of that kind of attention. Liuzzo, however, received by far the most media coverage, perhaps because her death came at the end of the campaign and what would have likely been the end of that particular news event cycle, but mostly because she was white and female.8
The two males killed during the Charlottesville Unite the Right debacle were not activists. Lt. H. Jay Cullen and Berke M. M. Bates were state police pilots who had spent the day in their helicopter above the scenes of confrontation in downtown Charlottesville, providing surveillance video to Virginia State Police of the melee below them.9 Their helicopter went down, apparently because of a technical failure, exactly three hours after the car attack, killing the two pilots instantly. Cullen's and Bates's deaths received mostly local coverage.
Mediating Viola: From Brave Heroine to Race Traitor
Media coverage of Viola Liuzzo initially extolled her bravery and her status as a loving wife and mother. News coverage played up the pathos of her grieving husband and now motherless children. CBS's Evening News with Walter Cronkite broadcast a story inside the Liuzzo home documenting the family's grief.10 The wire service United Press International (UPI) provided a similar story illustrated with photos of the Liuzzo family.11 Politicians described her as brave and courageous, and her motivations were framed as the actions of one “who spent much of her life fighting for the rights of others.”12 Predictably, white supremacists pushed back at this way of understanding Mrs. Liuzzo. The Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, Robert Shelton, told reporters that Liuzzo was “set up to become a martyr and another rallying point for the civil rights movement. If this woman was at home with the children where she belonged she wouldn't have been in jeopardy.”13
Liuzzo was thus responsible for her own murder, according to the KKK. In white supremacist gender politics, white women's fundamental duty was to bear white children—and Liuzzo accomplished that task. But they were also supposed to accept and subordinate themselves to white male patriarchs. Liuzzo failed at that requirement, having left her home and family, refusing to submit herself to her husband's wishes, and putting the rights and concerns of Black people above those of her white family. She was, by this logic, a race traitor.14
This kind of misogyny and victim-blaming could have stayed sequestered in white supremacist publications. It did not. As Liuzzo's biographer Mary Stanton has detailed, Selma's sheriff Jim Clark contacted a police commissioner that he knew from Liuzzo's home state of Michigan, requesting a file on the murdered civil rights activist. The resulting report, full of personal details, quickly found its way into the hands of the Klan and then not only to the segregationist press but to national media as well. Liuzzo's reputation deteriorated as newspapers like the New York Times circulated details from the report.
In a story initially framed around the question of how the information about Mrs. Liuzzo had become available, the Times piece delved into details from the report into the murdered woman's private life. The formerly brave and courageous civil rights crusader extolled for jumping into her car and driving alone to Selma after seeing the violent news film from the Edmund Pettus Bridge was now, in the pages of the “newspaper of record,” described driving alone in 1964 through New York State and up into Canada while reported missing by her husband. With quotes directly from the report, readers learned that Mr. Liuzzo received despondent letters from his errant wife. “One letter was written by Viola while she was in a cemetery. She was giving births and deaths of various people and concluded the letter with her own birth and death date.”15 The unstated implication: this woman—who no longer merited the era's courtesy title of “Mrs.”—was possibly suicidal with a penchant for impulsively jumping into her car for long-distance trips that had less to do with social justice aims and more to do with assumed mental illness. In July 1965, the Ladies’ Home Journal ran a poll of women's responses to Liuzzo's actions in leaving her home and children to support the voting rights movement in Selma. Fifty-five percent of the women polled responded that she should have stayed home; only 26 percent thought she had a right to go.16 Selma's other white martyr, Rev. James Reeb, also left behind a large family of children and a spouse to travel to Selma, but, as Gary May notes in his book on the Liuzzo case, Rev. Reeb was not castigated for his actions: “Liuzzo's rejection of traditional gender roles and expectations played a significant role in robbing her of her martyrdom.”17Newsweek magazine dismissed and diminished her as “a plumpish, perky blonde, belatedly a sophomore at Wayne State University who liked a cause.”18
Segregationist and white supremacist media responses were far more brutal. Because Viola Liuzzo was a race traitor, it only made sense to them that she must also have been involved in interracial sexual relations. A Klan-produced magazine, Night Riders: The Inside Story of the Liuzzo Killing, featuring crime scene photos of her dead body on the cover and inside the volume, claimed that she was “hopped up” on dope and insinuated a sexual relationship between her and her teenage Black companion, Leroy Moton. They were seen “holding hands in public and walking around with their arms locked about each others’ waists.”19 In fact, the two barely knew each other.20 But to racists and segregationists, any images of white females and Black males in close proximity had to suggest sexual intimacy. The publication featured a photo of Liuzzo marching in bare feet, holding her shoes, and wearing a determined expression. A tall Black man, partially obscured, may have been Moton. Numerous other pictures of Selma-to-Montgomery marchers were highlighted with circles around white females next to Black males. One such photo included the helpful caption: “Choose your partner. Throughout the march, white girls found Negro men irresistible.”21
Because Liuzzo had violated racial and gender boundaries, Grand Wizard Shelton, during the trial of the Klan defendants, lashed out to reporters: “They portrayed her as being the mother of five lovely children and a community worker. The fact is she was a fat slob with crud that looked like rust all over her body [and] she was braless.”22 The Klan lawyer representing the defendants in his cross-examination of the doctor who performed Liuzzo's autopsy wanted to know whether she'd worn underpants and had had sexual relations (she had not). What were the conditions of her clothes and body—clean or unclean? Because she had been marching all day, sometimes taking her shoes off probably to relieve swollen feet, she wasn't very clean, the doctor testified.
This trope about the unclean white female body fits within white supremacist gender and race ideology. The nonwhite body was diseased, unclean, and inferior. Interracial contact between nonwhites and white people, especially white females, infected the white body, threatening to make whites dirty as well.23 The insinuation that Liuzzo must have been sexually intimate with a Black male meant her body was now polluted and disgusting.
Mediating Heather: White Supremacist Misogyny Redux
Fifty-two years later, coverage of Heather Heyer's death was quite similar to the initial press coverage of Viola Liuzzo.24 Heyer was “a strong woman who stood up against discrimination,” according to a New York Times headline. The story focused on friends who “described her as a passionate advocate for the disenfranchised.”25 Politicians extolled her bravery, tweeting out that Heyer “died standing up against hate & bigotry. Her bravery should inspire all to come together.”26
But just like their predecessors a half century earlier, alt-right leaders and influencers pushed back with misogyny, reaching a potentially far wider, albeit niche, audience using social media platforms than the Klan could muster with its media tools a half century earlier.27 The Unite the Right rally organizer, Jason Kessler, sent out a tweet calling Heyer “a fat, disgusting Communist.”28 Other alt-right white supremacists and racists piled on the fat-shaming in social media posts. Viola Liuzzo had been similarly discounted for being fat. In both cases, criticism of their bodies was another means to mark these women as not properly white and female. In white supremacist thinking, beginning in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, fatness became tied to signs of ethnic and racial inferiority, according to Amy Farrell in her book Fat Shame: Stigma and the Fat Body in American Culture. “Primitive” peoples and all women had proclivities to fatness, which, according to this school of thought, proved that they were lower on the evolutionary scale. Because all women were considered to be at risk, when a white woman became fat, it meant she “had moved down—had degraded—on the scale of civilization.”29 Heyer and Liuzzo, because their bodies did not conform to ideals of white femininity and because they actively engaged with racial “others,” were cast out of whiteness. Labeling their bodies as fat and disgusting did the job.
Just as white supremacists deemed Liuzzo responsible for her own death by being out of place and not under the proper protection of her white husband, so Heyer was also blamed for her own death. In her case, it was because she was fat, which some said caused a heart attack. (Heyer actually died of blunt force trauma.)30 Hunter Wallace, a prominent white nationalist on the alt-right blog Occidental Dissent, appeared to start this bogus theory; it was amplified by others in various white racist social media hubs, where Heyer was further fat-shamed.31 Some of these 2017 social media venues, like the Klan publication Night Riders in the 1960s, also had no qualms about publishing photos of the dead woman's murdered body.32 In both Liuzzo's and Heyer's cases, the photos displayed their bodies but not their faces, further dehumanizing and degrading them.
The most notorious debasement of Heather Heyer occurred on the Daily Stormer website a mere day after her murder. Written by Andrew Anglin, a full-throated Nazi, the piece also blamed Heyer for her own death: in this case her fatness made her too slow to get out of the way of an admirably fast car. But Anglin seemed particularly interested in the one significant way that Heyer differed from Liuzzo: Heyer had no children. Anglin pointed out her age and the fact that she was childless. He made hateful comments about what that fact meant about her value, burden to society, and neglect of her fundamental maternal duty.33 His comments were vile enough to get the Daily Stormer booted off the internet, at least for a while, with one service provider after another refusing to host the site.
There wasn't anything terribly surprising or novel about his comments, however. They were at the heart of modern white supremacy and its “Fourteen Words” mantra: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.”34 Heyer had, by this logic, neglected to secure that existence by not giving birth to white children. Kathleen Belew, writing about the white power movement in the post-Vietnam era, points out how white power activists believed “the future of the white race . . . rest[ed] with the mothers of white children.” Every white woman was required to bear them. She quotes one neo-Nazi newspaper declaring over a photo of a white woman: “If this woman doesn't have three or more children during her lifetime she is helping to speed her Race along the road to extinction.”35 By not being married to a white man and being childless, Heather Heyer was another race traitor hastening “the Great Replacement”; she was therefore disgusting.
While some of the white supremacist misogyny that swirled around Viola Liuzzo found its way into mainstream media coverage, undermining and tarnishing her status as a civil rights martyr, nothing similar happened with Heather Heyer. In fact, Heyer has become the name and face of resistance to the Summer of Hate in Charlottesville. The narrow side street off the city's downtown pedestrian mall where the car attack happened has been renamed “Heather Heyer Way.” For well over a year after the attacks, shops and businesses around town displayed decals with her name and a heart, always in violet, known among many Charlottesvillians to be her favorite color. A foundation in her name provides scholarships to students pursuing degrees or certifications in fields dedicated to social change and unity.36 Honors and respect for Liuzzo would come only many decades after her death as her children struggled to rehabilitate her legacy.37
Why were white supremacists so successful in turning the mainstream media against a white female antiracist activist in 1965, whereas their alt-right successors in 2017, using similar tropes, not only were unsuccessful in raising questions about Heyer's status as a woman, her appearance, or activity but were, in the case of Anglin, literally chased off the internet? Mary Stanton, in her 1998 biography, ponders the question of why Liuzzo never became a civil rights movement symbol and why the sullying of her reputation went unchallenged. She suggests that Liuzzo had “no organized constituency to defend her.”38 Because Liuzzo went to Selma on her own, she had no coordinated group to speak or vouch for her. Her husband, a member of Teamsters Union, which was under scrutiny at the time for its strong-arm tactics, was himself being smeared publicly. He didn't have the emotional capacity to become her champion in front of the media. Viola Liuzzo had no one to be her spokesperson and media advocate. Considering the era's less diversified media environment, it would have been more difficult for alternative voices—especially feminist ones from the barely nascent second-wave women's movement—to break through quickly and nimbly in order to speak for her.39
Susan Bro's Media Platform: Magnifying Heather
Heather Heyer, in contrast, had her mother, Susan Bro. Heyer's status as the martyr of the Unite the Right violence would be solidified four days later at her memorial at the thousand-seat Paramount Theater, two short blocks from where she had been killed. National and international media covered the memorial and made a diminutive woman with long, white-grey hair and a schoolteacher's demeanor a sudden media phenomenon. Susan Bro, from the depths of grief and anguish, was somehow able to speak memorable sound bites: “They tried to kill my child to shut her up. But guess what? You just magnified her.” “I'd rather have my child, but by golly, if I have to give her up, make it count.”40
Without preparation or any media training, Mrs. Bro was blessed with natural on-camera communication skills. One CBS reporter covering the memorial remarked that she was “incredibly articulate—and emotional.” He noted that while Heyer's mother didn't like talking on camera, she was ready to do it for her daughter.41 And she did, over and over again. Susan Bro became a frequent media presence on a variety of media platforms that reach a variety of different audiences, from network television news and twenty-four-hour cable news to MTV and its 2017 Video Music Awards show, where she announced the formation of the Heather Heyer Foundation. She was a go-to interviewee when alt-right violence perpetrators were arrested, charged, and put on trial. Media outlets went to her for comments on the first anniversary of the Summer of Hate; when the neo-Nazi who killed her daughter was tried and convicted first on state charges and later federally; when Joe Biden announced his candidacy for the presidency in 2019 by invoking “Charlottesville” in a campaign video; and at a Congressional Oversight Committee on white supremacy. Susan Bro has had a powerful and continuing media platform. She spoke calmly, with deliberation, but never appeared coached or scripted. Her grandmotherly and folksy demeanor made her approachable. Channeling her daughter's antiracist cause, Susan Bro was potentially more adept at making Heather Heyer's antiracist politics legible and acceptable to white viewers and perhaps more palatable to those in the white working class, since Bro herself identifies as working class. Unlike Viola Liuzzo's Teamster husband, Susan Bro was unassailable. While she was inevitably fat-shamed like her daughter in the dank corners of the white nationalist web, in mainstream media she controlled her message and almost single-handedly, beginning at her daughter's memorial, ensured Heather Heyer's status as a martyr to white nationalist hate.
Another reason the misogyny that had circulated against Viola Liuzzo in the 1960s did not spread successfully outside the dark web of the alt-right in 2017 had much to do with the impact of feminism in the decades since her death. Mary Stanton suggests that “for feminists, her blue collar lifestyle made her uninteresting.”42 This explanation doesn't seem quite adequate. The organized second-wave women's movement was in its early days in the mid-1960s. The National Organization for Women would not come into being until a year after Liuzzo's murder. Betty Friedan's best-selling book The Feminine Mystique, which attempted to diagnose the dissatisfaction and lack of fulfillment that marriage and stay-at-home motherhood provided for the middle-class white women she studied, appeared in 1963. Liuzzo's biography seemed a textbook case of a woman responding admirably to Friedan's “problem that has no name.”43 But feminism as a political movement had not quite asserted itself into national consciousness and mass media attention, as it would by the late 1960s and 1970s.44 White supremacist gender politics were not fundamentally different from the naturalized understandings of white women's and men's appropriate roles that predominated in post–World War II America. Klansmen and white supremacists may have stated those politics in more crude and hateful terms, but the underlying arguments wouldn't have been all that shocking, as the polling by the Ladies’ Home Journal suggested: the majority of those women agreed with the Klan's Grand Wizard about Viola Liuzzo's proper place.
By 2017, a newly energized “fourth wave” feminist movement, from the 2017 Women's March to #TimesUp and #MeToo, ensured that alt-right misogyny, bearing little difference from its predecessors, would have much less of a chance of gaining any purchase in mainstream media.45 The rapid and outright shutdown of Andrew Anglin suggests the enduring power of liberal feminism to protect the reputations of at least some women. What happened to Viola Liuzzo in 1965 would be much less likely to happen to her in 2017.
Mediating the Black Female Activist Victim: Annie Lee Cooper, 1965 / Veronica Fitzhugh, 2017
But what if Heyer had been Black? What if Liuzzo had been Black? The title of the foundational volume that helped give birth to the scholarly field of Black women's studies and that inspired legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw in her seminal work on intersectional feminism remains salient here: “All the men were black, all the women were white, but some of us were brave.”46 The mass media saw Black men as civil rights leaders and white supremacy's victims; it also saw white women. Black women were largely invisible both during the coverage of the Selma campaign and in media treatment of the Summer of Hate in Charlottesville. The press, during and immediately following August 12, 2017, tended to privilege the city's male white mayor and Black vice-mayor, along with a white clergyman, Seth Wispelwey, who was active with a local activist clergy group. Black women organizers and leaders remained largely unseen, with the exception of Dr. Jalane Schmidt, a UVA religious studies professor and key activist and organizer with Charlottesville's Black Lives Matter, who received some national and international media attention in the immediate aftermath of the crisis.47 The situation fifty years earlier in Selma wasn't all that different. For instance, the SCLC and SNCC's Diane Nash and the Dallas County Voters League's Amelia Boynton were key leaders and organizers of the Selma campaign. Boynton achieved media visibility only briefly. On one occasion early in the campaign, she was manhandled by Sheriff Clark during a march on the county courthouse and dragged by her coat in front of news photographers; the dramatic photo appeared in both the New York Times and the Washington Post.48 A photo of Boynton crumpled on the ground, unconscious from the blows of a state trooper during the Edmund Pettus Bridge assault, also circulated widely.
The activist Annie Lee Cooper also received fleeting media attention when, foregoing the movement's leaders’ admonitions to remain nonviolent, she slugged Sheriff Clark after he shoved and insulted fellow would-be registrants waiting in line at the courthouse. With photographers and TV news cameras recording, Clark and a few of his deputies threw Cooper violently to the ground. A photo of Clark on top of Cooper, with his billy club poised over her head as the deputies forcefully pinned her down, appeared in newspapers around the country.49
None of these instances of white supremacist violence against African American women resulted in ongoing media attention to them. Like Boynton, Cooper was not quoted in national media coverage; only her brutalized body spoke. Annie Lee Cooper would likely have remained unknown to everyone but historians of the Selma campaign had it not been for filmmaker Ava DuVernay and Oprah Winfrey, who highlighted Cooper in DuVernay's acclaimed and successful 2015 Hollywood film, Selma.50 By portraying the role of Cooper, Winfrey ensured this civil rights activist would no longer be unheard and invisible.51
The beating of Black female civil rights activists by law enforcement may not have been as newsworthy as the cold-blooded murder of a white female activist by Klan members, but for the mass media, even the most inconsequential appearance of a white woman during the Selma campaign could get boosted into a significant news event. Life magazine ran a multipage cover story on the aftermath of the Edmund Pettus Bridge violence and found it worthwhile to devote an entire page featuring two color photos of Illinois senator Paul Douglas's wife, who had traveled to Selma along with so many others. Mrs. Paul Douglas was in no way a significant political figure, but Life magazine's decision to highlight a large color image of her maternally placing a white-gloved hand on Martin Luther King Jr.’s shoulder in a gesture of support suggested that she mattered.52 What mattered was her whiteness.
The media treatment of Selma's Annie Lee Cooper maps surprisingly closely onto that of Charlottesville's Veronica Fitzhugh in 2017. Fitzhugh is a queer femme Black activist known for her community defense work and for her creative sartorial presentation in her everyday life and protest activity. Like Annie Lee Cooper, Fitzhugh is physically large; in her 2017 protest activity, she took up space and was confrontational. They could both be defined as “unruly women,” a concept first deployed by the historian of early modern Europe Natalie Zemon Davis and then adopted by the media studies scholar Kathleen K. Rowe, who defined unruly as “whenever women, especially women's bodies, are considered excessive—too fat, too mouthy, too old, too dirty, too pregnant, too sexual (or not sexual enough) for the norms of conventional gender representation. . . . Through body and speech, the unruly woman violates the unspoken feminine sanction against ‘making a spectacle’ of herself.”53
In the case of Cooper, as I have discussed elsewhere in a textual analysis of the CBS Evening News coverage of her confrontation with Sheriff Clark, the news organization emphasized Cooper's excessiveness and represented her protest action as an unruly spectacle. She was portrayed as odd: tracking down a line at the courthouse of mostly well-dressed Black women would-be registrants, CBS's camera paused on a shoeless Cooper, zooming in on her stockinged feet and panning over to her footwear placed on another step. She was then shown in close-up appearing shifty eyed. During the confrontation with Clark and his deputies, CBS managed to get a disconcertingly extreme close-up of Cooper either grimacing or smiling strangely, and then in a longer shot, she is seen being roughly rolled over and hauled up, still shoeless, by the law officers.54 Everything about Cooper was depicted as “too much”: her bodily presentation, her refusal to appear properly dignified, her resistance.
Veronica Fitzhugh was similarly depicted in media accounts as unruly and excessive, although for the most part media coverage about her activism during the Summer of Hate and afterward remained local. She was arrested a number of times for challenging white supremacists in the run-up to the Unite the Right rally on August 12. Forcefully confronting Jason Kessler, she was charged with disorderly conduct and assault. Her crime: she shook the chair he was sitting on at an outdoor patio with members of the Proud Boys on Charlottesville's downtown pedestrian mall. Her action was part of a community defense antiracist effort to confront the white supremacists who were increasingly congregating publicly in the months leading up to the Unite the Right rally. More visibly, during the Ku Klux Klan rally on July 8, 2017, Fitzhugh, in an act of civil disobedience, tried to block the path of a motley crew of Klansmen into a local park, as Virginia state troopers and local police protected the Klansmen rather than the thousand-plus anti-Klan protesters. Fitzhugh was aggressively arrested and charged with obstruction. A photo of her arrest, prone on the ground with police over her, echoed the more famous photo of Annie Lee Cooper. Two unruly Black women in protest against white supremacy found themselves pinned to the ground by white law enforcement officers as news photographers took pictures.55
Just as media coverage of Cooper silenced her and focused on her visual excessiveness, local media in Charlottesville did the same with Fitzhugh. The UVA English graduate and poet was seldom given voice in the town's daily paper or news weekly to explain her activism or her self-presentation. News coverage emphasized what it deemed to be her strangeness. An article in C-ville Weekly reporting on her not-guilty verdict opened with this lede: “Wearing a hot pink wig and carrying the head of Donald Trump as a purse. . . . ” The article went on to quote both her attorney and the Commonwealth Attorney who prosecuted her case. The latter opined that Fitzhugh may have been arrested for “admirable reasons” but that “she simply took it too far.”56 Framed as an unruly Black woman in her refusal to stay within proper bounds, she did not behave herself while confronting the fact that Klansmen not only had been permitted to rally in a city park but received a police escort and protection to do so. The article ended with the reporter observing: “The activist, known for her outlandish wardrobe, will go on trial for the assault and disorderly conduct charges [her actions against Kessler] November 20. What will she wear next?”57C-ville Weekly seemed less concerned about anything that Fitzhugh might have to say. While her self-presentation was obviously a component of her message, the media's disinclination to quote her inevitably silenced and marginalized her.
Conclusion
It matters whose lives, voices, bodies, and experiences are given a media platform. In dying for racial justice, two white women mattered. But what does one do with that fact? Susan Bro, speaking before a House Committee examining white supremacist violence, chose to be self-reflexive about the platform she continued to be given in the years following the Unite the Right mayhem. “Heather was killed primarily because Mr. Fields was aiming to kill someone who he thought was Black,” she told Congress, noting that the neo-Nazi plowed into a crowd of Black Lives Matter supporters. “I've been given a huge platform because I'm white, and many Black parents lose their children, many Muslim parents lose their children, Jewish parents lose their children, and nobody pays attention. And because we have this myth of the sacredness of the white female, I've been given a platform, so I'm going to use that platform to keep drawing attention back to where the issues are.”58
White women as a slice of the population are certainly imperiled by the rise of right-wing extremism and white supremacy, considering how their life choices would be constrained by Handmaid's Tale–style patriarchy that the alt-right envisions. However, as Bro noted, other groups with less access to news media microphones are far more vulnerable and more clearly in the crosshairs of this movement. Recent mass murder events—at a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019, killing fifty-one Muslims; at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, that same year, targeting Latinos and murdering twenty-two; and at a synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018, massacring eleven Jews—are all examples of white supremacist extremism; the shooters in all these cases left online manifestos parroting the ideology of the alt-right.59 As in 1965, when the death of a white woman motivated the nation—and its president, who involved himself personally in Liuzzo's case—to get voting rights legislation passed, so it was in 2017, when the death of another white woman concentrated the nation's attention about the palpable threat of alt-right extremism. If these two martyrs to the antiracist cause had been Black women or Latina women, it is possible that Selma and Charlottesville would never have elicited the sustained national outrage that made both these Southern towns into symbols of the struggle against white supremacy.
Notes
The Southern Poverty Law Center honors both Liuzzo and Heyer as martyrs, with Heyer so designated mere days after her death. See https://www.splcenter.org/news/2017/08/18/splc-honors-heather-heyer-civil-rights-memorial-center. I do want to be mindful of the racial dynamics of elevating “woke” white women in the struggles against racism and how that tends to minimize or efface the work of Black women. While I hope to problematize that dynamic here, this article may also perpetuate some of its aspects. A useful quote is applicable here: “Behind every ‘woke’ white person is the labor of people of color.” Thanks to my colleague Dr. Jalane Schmidt for this insight.
Aniko Bodroghkozy, Equal Time: Television and the Civil Rights Movement (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012), 115–16.
Mary Stanton, From Selma to Sorrow: The Life and Death of Viola Liuzzo (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998). See also Gary May, The Informant: The FBI, the Ku Klux Klan, and the Murder of Viola Liuzzo (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011).
I was one of them, trained in nonviolent direct action; I also participated in the protest against the Klan rally.
Even though Liuzzo lived an economically comfortable life with her second husband, because he was a union official, Stanton labels her as working class. Heyer, with a high school diploma and raised mostly by a single mother in a double-wide trailer, more clearly fits that designation.
Gail Sheehy, “What Heather Heyer Knew,” The Cut, 31 August 2017, https://www.thecut.com/2017/08/what-heather-heyer-knew.html.
Independent Review of the 2017 Protest Events in Charlottesville, Virginia (Richmond, VA: Hunton and Williams, 2017), also known as “The Heaphy Report.” See also Hawes Spencer, Summer of Hate: Charlottesville, USA (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2018).
Bodroghkozy, Equal Time, 132–33.
Spencer, Summer of Hate, 199. As an activist on the streets that day, I was acutely aware of that helicopter as the continuous sound of its propellers formed a sonic backdrop to everything I experienced.
By 1965, the early evening half-hour network news show was gaining on NBC's top-rated Huntley-Brinkley Report in viewer popularity. Audience numbers for the network news shows in this period were in the twenty million range. See the classic study of 1960s-era TV news, Edward Jay Epstein, News from Nowhere: Television and the News (New York: Vintage, 1973).
Bodroghkozy, Equal Time, 133; “Liuzzo Family Grief Stricken,” Chicago Tribune, 27 March 1965.
“Rights Killing Invokes Anger of Americans,” Chicago Tribune, 27 March 1965; “Slain Rights Aid Was Crusader: She's Recalled as Fighter for Dropouts,” Chicago Tribune, 27 March 1965.
Stanton, From Selma to Sorrow, 55.
See, for instance, Abby L. Ferber, White Man Falling: Race, Gender, and White Supremacy (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998); Jessie Daniels, White Lies: Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality in White Supremacist Discourse (New York: Routledge, 1997); Abby L. Ferber, ed., Home-Grown Hate: Gender and Organized Racism (New York: Routledge, 2003).
“Liuzzo File Study Opens in Detroit,” New York Times, 16 May 1965.
Stanton, From Selma to Sorrow, 171–72.
May, The Informant, 278.
Stanton, From Selma to Sorrow, 100.
May, The Informant, 278. See also Civil Rights Heritage Museum Online, “KKK Magazine ‘Night Riders’ about Viola Liuzzo Murder,” https://civilrightsheritage.com/2014/09/28/night-riders-kkk-magazine-about-viola-liuzzo-murder/, which includes images from the notorious publication.
J. Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI, may have helped begin these scurrilous and malicious rumors. Within days of Liuzzo's death, he told President Johnson about needle marks on her body and suggestions of amorous behavior with Moton. See May, The Informant, 169. LBJ, to his credit, ignored the FBI director's comments.
Night Riders: The Inside Story of the Liuzzo Killing (Birmingham, AL: BRALGO Publications, 1966).
May, The Informant, 190.
Ferber, White Man Falling, 79–80.
By media coverage here I am focused on outlets that consider themselves nonpartisan and invested in journalistic ideals continuous with those of fifty years ago, such as the New York Times, the BBC, CNN, and the “legacy” TV network news divisions. While the media ecosystem has changed, the ethos of these institutions about how they conduct journalism has not altered in any fundamental way.
Christina Caron, “Friends Recall ‘a Strong Woman’ Who Stood Up against Discrimination,” New York Times, 14 August 2017.
“Charlottesville: Who Was Victim Heather Heyer?,” BBC News, 14 August 2017, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-40924922.
Scholars have explored how the Klan and other far-right extremists were early adopters of the internet and social media as venues for organizing and proselytizing. See, for instance, Adam Klein, Fanaticism, Racism, and Rage Online (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017); and Jessie Daniels, “The Algorithmic Rise of the ‘Alt-Right,’ ” Contexts 17, no. 1 (2018): 60–65.
Spencer, Summer of Hate, 230.
Amy Erdman Farrell, Fat Shame: Stigma and the Fat Body in American Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2011), 64.
C. Suarez Rojas, “Assistant Chief Medical Exam Confirms Blunt Force Injury as Cause of Heather Heyer's Death,” Richmond Times-Dispatch, 3 December 2018, https://www.richmond.com/news/virginia/assistant-chief-medical-examiner-confirms-blunt-force-injury-as-cause/article_a932c291-e128-5a60-9d65-29d490951e22.html.
See Alex Kaplan, “Fringe Media Are Furiously Trying to Absolve the White Nationalist Who Allegedly Killed Heather Heyer,” Media Matters for America, 8 September 2017, https://www.mediamatters.org/blog/2017/09/08/Fringe-media-are-furiously-trying-to-absolve-the-white-nationalist-who-allegedly-killed-He/217886. Kaplan's online article provides copious links to examples of alt-right social media sites where the victim-blaming and fat-shaming of Heyer occurred.
Given the much quicker copying and distribution capabilities of social media, the 2017 photos potentially circulated more widely.
I have no desire—nor do I believe it necessary—to quote Anglin's words. Readers who wish to see the article can search for it themselves. See Andrew Anglin, Daily Stormer, 13 August 2017.
George Hawley, The Alt-Right: What Everyone Needs to Know (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 46.
Kathleen Belew, Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), 160.
See the Heather Heyer Foundation, https://www.heatherheyerfoundation.com.
In 1991, the women of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference erected a marker to Liuzzo at the site of her death. It has had to be protected with steel fencing from defacement by white supremacists. More recently, in 2019, a statue of Liuzzo was unveiled in a Detroit park named for her. Susan Bro, Heather Heyer's mother, attended and was quoted in Detroit media coverage. See, for instance, Julie Hinds and Micah Walker, “Detroit Statue Finds a Barefoot, Undaunted Viola Liuzzo Walking Again for Civil Rights,” Detroit Free Press, 23 July 2019, https://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/2019/07/23/statue-civil-rights-icon-viola-liuzzo-dedicated-detroit-park/1806238001/.
Stanton, From Selma to Sorrow, 112.
Even when feminist voices did break through, beginning in the late 1960s and early 1970s, dominant media outlets like the television networks and the national news magazines tended to ridicule the movement. See Bonnie J. Dow, Watching Women's Liberation, 1970: Feminism's Pivotal Year on the Network News (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2014); and Susan J. Douglas, Where the Girls Are: Growing Up Female with the Mass Media (New York: Random House, 1994).
See, for instance, NBC Nightly News, 16 August 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJjNfaFGYu0.
“Heather Heyer Remembered at Memorial,” CBS News, 16 August 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hmdeTv9_OfU.
Stanton, From Selma to Sorrow, 221.
Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York: Norton, 1963).
Douglas, Where the Girls Are. See also Dow, Watching Women's Liberation, 1970.
On fourth-wave feminism, see, for instance, Nicola Rivers, Postfeminism(s) and the Arrival of the Fourth Wave: Turning Tides (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).
Akasha Gloria Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith, eds., All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women's Studies (Old Westbury, NY: Feminist Press, 1982); Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics,” University of Chicago Legal Forum 1, art. 8 (1989): 139–67.
This assessment is based on my own extensive viewing of CNN and MSNBC's coverage of the aftermath of the Unite the Right violence. This viewing was not, however, a systematic study.
Juan Williams, Eyes on the Prize: America's Civil Rights Years, 1954–1965 (New York: Penguin, 1987), 259, 263.
Bodroghkozy, Equal Time, 120–21.
Aniko Bodroghkozy, “Mediating Selma, 1965, 2015,” in The Shadow of Selma, ed. Joe Street and Henry Knight Lozano (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2018), 144–46. See also Courtney R. Baker, “Framing Black Performance: Selma and the Poetics of Representation,” Camera Obscura 35, no. 1 (2020): 37–61.
The film took some creative license in its not very accurate portrayal of Cooper's assault on Sheriff Clark.
“Selma: Beatings Start the Savage Season,” Life, 19 March 1965.
Kathleen K. Rowe, “Roseanne: Unruly Woman as Domestic Goddess,” in Feminist Television Criticism: A Reader, ed. Charlotte Brunsdon, Julie D'Acci, and Lynn Spigel. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 76. See also Natalie Zemon Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1975).
Bodroghkozy, Equal Time, 120.
A photo of Fitzhugh's arrest can be seen here: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2017/8/25/1693174/-Join-us-to-demand-Charlottesville-DropALLcharges-against-racial-justice-hero-Veronica-Fitzhugh.
Samantha Baars, “Not Guilty: A Win for Veronica Fitzhugh,” C-ville Weekly, 27 October 2017.
Baars, “Not Guilty.”
“Susan Bro, Mother of Heather Heyer, Testifies before House Committee about White Supremacist Violence,” Richmond Times-Dispatch, 15 May 2019, https://www.richmond.com/news/virginia/susan-bro-mother-of-heather-heyer-testifies-before-house-committee/article_60486201-d193–5993–8729–00a32d6491c0.html.
Weiyi Cai, Troy Griggs, Jason Kao, Juliet Love, and Joe Ward, “White Extremist Ideology Drives Many Deadly Shootings,” New York Times, 4 August 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/04/us/white-extremist-active-shooter.html.
