The cost of speaking out
SBPRESS
Every movement for justice carries a price. Too often, women pay with their lives. Their voices become threats. Their bodies become battlegrounds. Their deaths are written off as collateral in a world where men make the rules and violence enforces them.
Harriette T. Moore was a schoolteacher in Florida who believed education could be liberation. Alongside her husband, Harry, she built voter registration campaigns and organized for equal pay for Black teachers. By 1951, their work had made Florida home to the highest number of registered Black voters in the South. That December, a bomb planted by the Ku Klux Klan exploded in their bedroom on Christmas night. Harry died on the way to the hospital. Harriette lived nine more days before succumbing to her injuries. They became the first martyrs of the modern civil rights movement. Their work was punished because it worked.
HARRY T. AND HARRIETTE V. MOORE CULTURAL COMPLEX
Fourteen years later, another woman took the risk of showing up. Viola Liuzzo left her home in Detroit, where she was raising five children, and drove to Selma, Alabama. Her activism had been shaped by her friendship with Sara Evans, a Black woman she met while working as a cashier in a grocery store. Their bond sharpened her sense of injustice and moved her from sympathy into solidarity. Viola joined the movement after Bloody Sunday, answering Martin Luther King Jr.’s call to march for voting rights. She ferried volunteers, offered aid, and told her husband, “It’s everybody’s fight.” On March 25, 1965, after the Selma to Montgomery march ended, she drove a young Black man, Leroy Moton, back toward Selma. Four Klansmen pulled up beside her car and shot her twice in the head. She was thirty-nine. Her children were left without a mother, and her name was dragged through the mud by those who wanted to erase her sacrifice.
PENNY LIUZZO HERRINGTON AND MARY STANTON FROM ENCYCLOPEDIA OF ALABAMA
Decades later, the story repeats. Oluwatoyin “Toyin” Salau was nineteen, Nigerian American, and living in Tallahassee. She marched for Black lives, protested the police killing of George Floyd and Tony McDade, and spoke out against anti-Black violence. She was fighting for us while still trying to survive her own battles. On June 6, 2020, she posted on Twitter that she had been sexually assaulted after fleeing abuse at home. Nine days later, she was found murdered. She had reached out for help, she had spoken her truth, and she was met with silence until her death.
Harriette. Viola. Toyin. Three women, across three generations, killed for the act of refusing silence. Their stories remind us that political violence is not distant history. It is a long companion. It cuts across decades, across movements, across communities. And women remain at its center, made expendable by outside enemies and by the very communities they serve.
To honor them, we must name what killed them. Racism. Misogyny. White supremacy. Patriarchy. The politics of men have always justified women’s deaths.
We also must name what they gave us. Harriette Moore’s insistence on Black political power, Viola Liuzzo’s conviction that freedom was worth leaving home for, and Toyin Salau’s courage to name her abuser out loud. Each woman left us a charge. Not to mourn quietly but to fight louder.
Their lives were not meant to be footnotes in history. They are instructions. They remind us that liberation demands more than endurance. It requires a refusal to let their silencing be the last word.
Say their names. Carry their work. Refuse the silence that killed them.
Take Action. Keep Their Voices Alive.
Support the work that honors Harriette, Viola, and Toyin
Justice for Black Girls – Freedom Fighters Fund
Fuel young Black girls like Toyin who speak out for freedom and safety.
Donate hereHarry T. and Harriette Moore Memorial Park and Museum
Preserve the legacy of the first martyrs of the modern civil rights movement.
Donate hereJim Crow Museum of Racist Imagery
Confront racism and honor the sacrifice of Viola Liuzzo and others who stood up.
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