Bibliograph

The informant, the FBI, the Ku Klux Klan, and the murder of Viola Liuzzo, Gary May

Type

Label

The informant, the FBI, the Ku Klux Klan, and the murder of Viola Liuzzo, Gary May

Language

eng

Index

no index present

Literary Form

non fiction

Main title

The informant

Nature of contents

dictionaries

Responsibility statement

Gary May

Sub title

the FBI, the Ku Klux Klan, and the murder of Viola Liuzzo

Summary

An FBI's informant's role in the murder of a civil rights activist by the KKK is. In 1965, Detroit housewife Viola Liuzzo drove to Alabama to help organize Martin Luther King's Voting Rights March from Selma, Alabama, to Montgomery. But after the march's historic success, Liuzzo was shot to death by members of the Birmingham Ku Klux Klan. The case drew national attention and was solved almost instantly, because one of the Klansman present during the shooting was Gary Thomas Rowe, an undercover FBI informant. At the time, Rowe's information and testimony were heralded as a triumph of law enforcement. But as Gary May reveals in this provocative book, Rowe's history of collaboration with both the Klan and the FBI was far more complex. Based on previously unexamined FBI and Justice Department Records, The Informant demonstrates that in their ongoing efforts to protect Rowe's cover, the FBI knowingly became an accessory to some of the most grotesque crimes of the Civil Rights era-including a vicious attack on the Freedom Riders and perhaps even the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. A tale of a renegade informant and a tragically dysfunctional intelligence system, The Informant offers a dramatic cautionary tale about what can happen when secret police power goes unchecked

Target audience

adult

Classification