Video: 'Statement on the Arrest of 4 KKK Members, 3/26/65.MP551.'

(Friday, March 26, 1965, 12:40 p.m. EST; during the African-American Civil Rights Movement (1954–68)) — U.S. President Lyndon Johnson Johnson declared war on the Ku Klux Klan today after announcing the arrest of four Klansmen in connection with the slaying last night of Viola Liuzzo, a white mother of five from Detroit who had come to Alabama to support voting rights for blacks, while she was ferrying marchers back to Selma from Montgomery.

In a dramatic television appearance, the President warned members of the Klan to get out of the white supremacy organizations that bear that name “before it is too late.”

Among the Klansmen in the car from which the shots were fired was FBI informant Gary Rowe.

Video: 'LBJ and J. Edgar Hoover, 3/26/65, 8.10A.'