This is the memory palace. I'm Nate de Mayo.

During the last week of July of 2019,

the city of Detroit, Michigan unveiled a statue to honor a native daughter,

Viola Liyuzo, who had been watching the evening news on March 7, 1965, like everyone else,

and saw there in black and white the police horses and the tear gas billowing.

And police batons coming down in the heads in the backs in the wrists of black men

and black women on Edmund Pettis Bridge in Selma, Alabama.

So crowds of white men and white women cheering on Alabama state police

as they beat people stomped on them, ran them down and horseback.

Viola Liyuzo told her husband not long after a few days,

told him that she was going to go down there to help, that it was everyone's fight.

Her husband remembered her saying,

there are too many people who just stand around talking.

She was 39 years old. She was a mother of five.

She left her children and her husband and drove their light blue Oldsmobile 800 mile south to try and help.

She stayed with an African American family in the George Washington Carver housing projects in Selma.

She used the Oldsmobile to run errands for the organizers,

shuttle packages and people from Selma to Montgomery,

as they planned a second march between those cities, though it would take three attempts.

Some days she just lent the car out. That was help enough.

Other days she'd be paired up with a 19 year old activist named Leroy Molten.

He knew the roads better. He could navigate, carry the heavier boxes.

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