On January 7, mere hours after 37-year-old mother Renée Nicole Good was executed by ICE agents in Minneapolis, Minnesota, conservative commentator Lauren Chen published a post which went viral among Trump supporters on X accusing the just-slain woman “insanity” for having been at the scene of the crime in the first place.
“This liberal woman was willing to take on federal agents, to disrupt ICE operations, in order to protect criminal Somalis,” Chen declared. “Obviously, she probably didn’t imagine she would be killed,” the pundit acknowledged, before insisting: surely, she must have known that, at the very least, she could be arrested.”
“She has three kids. So she was willing to be separated from her kids to protect criminal Somalis.”
“Speaking as a mother, this is insanity,” Chen insisted. “This is not rational thinking.”
“Instead,” she wrote, Good’s desire to impede ICE operations was “the result of liberal brainrot that convinces progressive women they have more of a duty to nurture and protect poor, brown (criminal!) strangers than their own country, and hell, even their own children.”
If this sounds familiar, it’s because it’s not the first time a white mother was accused of “insanity” after she was murdered in her car while standing up for her anti-racist beliefs.
In 1965, media in the Deep South said the same things about Viola Liuzzo, a 39-year-old mother of five who left Detroit to support the famous march from Selma demanding voting rights for black people.
Liuzzo was driving to Selma from Montgomery when a car full of klansmen chased her down, pulled alongside her speeding vehicle, and executed her at close range. One of them - widely believed to be the killer - was an FBI informant.
After her murder, the FBI immediately began a campaign of character assassination designed to neutralize any public support for Liuzzo by framing her as a mentally unstable, promiscuous drug user who’d abandoned her family to become an outside agitator.
A day after her murder, FBI Director J Edgar Hoover issued a memo stating he had spoken with President Johnson and warned him that the lacerations Liuzzo suffered after her car wrecked were actually “needle marks in her arms where she had been taking dope.”
Hoover claimed Liuzzo was having an affair with a 19-year-old Black man who’d volunteered to accompany her on a voter registration drive: “she was sitting, very very close to the Negro in the car; it had the appearance of a necking party.”
Hoover then advised President Johnson against speaking to her husband, who he claimed was “well known as a Teamster strong arm man.”
Elsewhere, the FBI dug up psychiatric records and the only criminal case against her, an incident in which she refused to send her children to school to protest a Detroit policy allowing kids to drop out when they were just 16. An FBI report used the episode to paint Liuzzo as a “professional crusader,” and cited a judge in the case as having claimed he was told by Detroit probation officers that “Viola Liuzzo was emotionally disturbed” and “appeared to be on the verge of a nervous breakdown.”
The FBI’s false and malicious smears were clearly concocted to avoid uncomfortable questions about the role of their informant in the execution of Davis, but they were largely successful in shifting public blame from Liuzzo’s killers to Liuzzo herself. Instead of “why did those men kill that woman,” the question became: “what was she doing away from home?”
Three of the klansmen in the car were sentenced to ten years in prison. One died before entering jail, and the other two served just five years of their sentences. Those two later testified under polygraph testing that the fourth man, Gary Rowe, pulled the trigger.
Rowe claimed that the other klansmen killed Liuzzo, but a polygraph test determined he was being deceptive. As an FBI informant, Rowe was granted immunity from prosecution and lived out the rest of his life under witness protection.
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