Constitution Center book-signing set July 28

Gary May, professor of history at UD

11:08 a.m., July 22, 2005--Gary May, professor of history at UD, will sign copies of his critically acclaimed new book, The Informant: The FBI, the Ku Klux Klan and the Murder of Viola Liuzzo, at 5 p.m., Thursday, July 28, at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia.

The book signing is part of a program in observance of the 40th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act. The program also includes a preview of Home of the Brave, a documentary film focusing on Viola Liuzzo, who was murdered in 1965 by white supremacists after participating in the Selma to Montgomery, Ala., march for voting rights, a landmark in the Civil Rights Movement.

The murder of Ms. Liuzzo, a white southern-born civil rights volunteer from Detroit and the mother of five, by the Klu Klux Klan is the subject of May’s book. The book focuses on the involvement in the shooting of Gary Thomas Rowe, an informant for the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Published in June, May’s book has garnered favorable reviews nationwide.

“With a prosecutorial zeal and palpable outrage, May delves through FBI files, trial transcripts and interviews to unravel an essentially co-dependent relationship between Rowe and his FBI enablers,” Book Editor Michael Ollove wrote in the June 5 issue of the Baltimore Sun.

A reviewer for Boston Globe said, May is a “riveting storyteller, conveying deep understanding of the times and their passions.”

In the July 3 issue of the Washington Post Book World, reviewer Jonathan Yardley wrote that May’s “fine book” serves to bring back “that dreadful time with all too much verisimilitude and tells, in exemplary fashion, a cautionary tale of real importance.”

A review in Publishers Weekly said, “May succeeds brilliantly at weaving his threads into an engrossing narrative, even while maintaining the three-dimensional humanity of both Liuzzo and Rowe. Contemporary resonance is provided by linking the FBI’s handling of Rowe with the challenges today’s bureau faces in the war on terror, which must also rely on unscrupulous and violent informants. This is popular history at its best and shines a long overdue light on a dark chapter in the FBI’s past.”

Photo by Kathy F. Atkinson
Book cover graphic used with permission from Yale University Press

E-mail this article

To learn how to subscribe to UDaily, click here.