The Informant: The FBI, the Ku Klux Klan, and the Murder of Viola Liuzzo
Gary May
In March 1965, civil rights worker Viola Liuzzo attended the Selma-to-Montgomery march for voting rights. Hours later, while she was giving a ride to another activist, a carload of Ku Klux Klansmen pulled alongside Liuzzo’s vehicle and someone in the car shot and killed her. Liuzzo’s murder made national headlines and law enforcement quickly identified and captured the perpetrators. That is because one of the men in car was Gary Thomas Rowe, an FBI informant. But in The Informant: The FBI, the Ku Klux Klan, and the Murder of Viola Liuzzo, author and historian Gary May gives details from formally undisclosed FBI records and Department of Justice documents to uncover a far more complicated partnership between Rowe, the FBI and the Klan. In addition, May sheds light on the how the FBI was complicit in other attacks on civil rights activists in an effort to keep Rowe’s undercover work a secret. (Yale University Press)
