Both mothers, both Christian activists, both White women under 40 who could not be silent in the face of injustice. Both shot dead; both slimed by their government with lies saved for strong women..
Jan 11, 2026
(Renee Nicole Good, shot in head by ICE agent; Viola Liuzzo, shot in head by KKK killers.)
The moment the news exploded about an ICE agent firing three-bullets into a Red maroon Honda Pilot and killing its’ driver, 37-year old Renee Nicole Good, Minneapolis mother of three, my mind leapt back 61 years and I thought of Viola Liuzzo.
Viola Liuzzo, 39-year old Detroit mother of five, Unitarian Universalist activist for peace and justice, shot dead twice in the head in her 1963 Oldsmobile, which she was driving from Montgomery, Alabama back to Selma, on the night of March 25, 1965, shuttling civil rights workers back to where they began an historic 50 mile march a few days earlier.
Both Good and Liuzzo did not have to be where they were, but their powerful commitment to their faith and to humanity compelled them to be there, where human dignity and human rights were on the line.
The flimsy, fraudulent cardboard Catholic JD Vance, who disagrees with Popes Francis and Leo on every fundamental teaching of Jesus about love, blamed the point-blank shooting of the young mother who had just dropped off her 6-year old son at school for her own death: “It’s a tragedy of her own making,” Vance said, lying that she was a “woman who aimed her car at a law enforcement officer.”
Back my brain raced to Viola Liuzzo, who, when her Teamster business agent husband told her that the Civil Rights battles in the South in 1965 were’t her fight, responded, that they were everyone’s fight. Moved by a series of “Bloody Sunday” marches in Alabama led by John Lewis across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, to the State Capitol in Montgomery— and by the murder at one march of a 38-year old Unitarian Universalist Minister from Boston, James Reeb—Liuzzo believed she had a moral responsibility to take action.
Less than a week after President Lyndon Johnson’s powerful March 15, 1965 speech to a joint session of Congress calling for passage of the Voting Rights Act, Liuzzo hired a nanny to watch her children while she headed south to join the marchers. The FBI, led by J. Edgar Hoover, slandered her for “abandoning her children” being “sexually promiscuous,” and “bringing it upon herself.”
Just as ICE, the Department of Homeland Security, and the entire Trump Administration lie repeatedly to cover-up their lawless, para-military immigration operation which has killed and arrested U.S. citizens with impunity as well as non-citizens, Hoover’s FBI had a specific reason to spread vicious lies about Viola Liuzzo: one of the four white men, in the car of Klansmen which murdered her and attempted to murder a male, Black civil rights worker driving with her, was undercover FBI agent, Gary T. Rowe. Hoover was obsessed with whitewashing that fact, and the truth the FBI agent did nothing to stop the pre-planned, pre-meditated murder from happening.
In the biography of Liuzzo, entitled From Selma to Sorrow: The Life and Death of Viola Liuzzo, author Mary Stanton wrote carefully about what happened after Liuzzo and Civil Rights worker Leroy Moton dropped five fellow marchers off at Selma Airport, and were headed back toward Montgomery:
“Between the airport and Selma a car full of whites drove up behind them and banged into the bumper of her Oldsmobile, several times before passing…Further along, the driver of another car turned on his high beams and shined them into Liuzzo’s rear view mirror. They followed her car for 20 miles…She attempted to outrun her pursuers by singing “We Shall Overcome” at the top of her lungs..Halfway between Selma and Montgomery the four men in the second car (including FBI Agent Rowe), pulled their car next to her’s. They shot at her (two bullets hit her head) and she was killed instantly. Her car crashed into a ditch. Moton escaped.”
The FBI and Hoover went into full cover-up and smear campaign mode, calling Liuzzo a “communist,” “drug addict”, and a “neglectful mother.” The facts about the FBI’s smear campaign were not revealed until 13 years later, under a Freedom of Information Act request.
The Washington Post’s Donna Britt wrote about it in 2017, in an article entitled “A White Mother went to Alabama to Fight for Civil Rights: The Klan Killed her for it:”
“Hoover charged that the cuts on Liuzzo’s arm from the car’s shattered window were signs of ‘recent drug use.’ and that her proximity to Leroy Moton in the car (a car that was transporting five other people to the airport) resembled “a necking party.”
Hoover spread those lies knowing that the autopsy of Liuzzo revealed no traces of drugs, nor indicated any traces of having had sex before she died. Like Noem, and Vance, and Donald Trump, J. Edgar Hoover simply made things up to cast a shadow of blame and shame on the female victim, accepting no responsibility for what their official negligence allowed to happen.
Singing from Hoover’s hymnal of hate and distraction, Trump Administration officials and their culpable, off-key chorus have repeatedly tried to blame Renee Nicole Good for her own death, and worse. Noem, Vance and Trump all accused Good of of being a “Domestic Terrorist,” and a “deranged Leftist,” despite her Christian upbringing, her birth in the conservative Air Force town of Colorado Springs, Colorado, and her first marriage to a military veteran, with whom she had a son. The young son’s father died two years ago.
Fox News flunkies like Jesse Waters attacked Good’s personal life pointing out that “she used pronouns in her bio,” and she leaves behind “ a Lesbian partner and a child from a previous marriage.”
Michelle Goldberg writes in the January 8, 2026 New York Times that:
“Fox News sneered that Good was a “self-proclaimed poet—(she was the winner of a prestigious poetry award)—with “pronouns in her bio.” Conservative radio host Erick Ericson described her as an AWFUL—Affluent White Female Urban Liberal.”
In truth, the insecure men of the Trump Administration, like J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, could not permit strong women to make them look weak. Liuzzo’s daughter Mary, who was in the 10th grade when her mother fought for civil rights in Alabama, told the Washington Post’s Donna Britt, that her mother was “a wonderful human being who loved every living creature.”
Using almost the identical words, in a January 10, 2026, New York Times story entitled “ Who Was Renee Good, the Woman Killed by an ICE Agent in Minneapolis?”, Renee Good’s wife, Becca, told the Times that Renee was “A Christian woman, who believed in loving others as well as nurturing kindness in people…She was made of sunshine.”
The world was exposed to Good’s kindness and “sunshine,” when a video taken by her killer, ICE Agent Jonathan Ross, recorded her saying to him, with total sincerity and a smile, “That’s fine, Dude, I’m not mad at you.”
Viola Liuzzo’s daughter Mary told the Washington Post who her mother was:
“She actually believed it when Christ said that the suffering and needy are OUR people. Mom saw ALL human beings as her people.”
So did Renee Nicole Good.
And, as the Washington Post’s Britt wrote, that was what was so threatening:
“Viola Liuzzo was a woman…and white. She was cute. She was a mom. Suddenly, I knew the monsters could kill anyone.”