|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
||||||
|
|
|
1965 Klan killing focus of prof’s new book
Indeed, blood was shed in 1963 with the killing of four young African-American girls attending Sunday school classes at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham after a bomb went off in the building. It was shed again in March 1965 with the assassination of Viola Liuzzo, a white Southern-born civil rights volunteer from Detroit and the mother of five, at the hands of the Ku Klux Klan after the historic Voting Rights march in Alabama. Ms. Liuzzo’s murder, and more particularly the involvement in the shooting by Federal Bureau of Investigation informant Gary Thomas Rowe, is the subject of a widely hailed new book by University of Delaware history professor Gary May. The Informant: The FBI, the Ku Klux Klan and the Murder of Viola Liuzzo is due out in June from the Yale University Press. The book is both a riveting history and a cautionary tale, as the United States again turns to the widespread use of informants in the international war on terrorism. It traces the rise of Tommy Rowe, a strongly built high school dropout and self-proclaimed “hell raiser” with a keen interest in police work, from a nobody to a valued informant planted deep inside the KKK, one who may have stepped well over the line in maintaining his cover by participating in acts of extreme violence against proponents of civil rights. The book received an enthusiastic review in Publishers Weekly, which noted, “May, whose previous explorations of American history in works such as Un-American Activities: The Trials of William Remington were critically acclaimed for their vivid writing and painstaking research, has turned his formidable talents to restoring a controversial episode in the civil rights struggle.” The review continued, “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.” May was interviewed by Wisconsin Public Radio on March 25, the 40th anniversary of the march and Ms. Liuzzo’s murder, and he is scheduled for other media appearances in New York and California in June. The book will also be featured in premiere issue of Justice Magazine on June 21. May said he selected the topic after doing some research on murders during the civil rights movement and finding that Ms. Liuzzo was the only white female to lose her life in that struggle. “I’m the kind of historian who is always looking for interesting stories,” he said. “I see myself as a storyteller. I enjoy writing about historical events and their effects on ordinary people.” May approached Dean A. Robb, a lawyer who represented the Liuzzo family in a wrongful death suit against the FBI. Because of the suit, he said a wealth of records were available that historians “normally would not get their hands on.” “When a story really grabs me, I’m lost in it,” May said. “It takes you over. That was the case with this story.” He was able to interview two of the Liuzzo children, son Tony and daughter Mary, and one of Rowe’s FBI handlers. However, he was rebuffed during repeated attempts to reach members of the Rowe family. May found that the murder and resulting court cases “had a tremendous impact on the family,” both in the loss of their mother and in the KKK campaign to smear her during the murder trial. “The family was subjected to an incredible amount of abuse, both at the trial and at their home in Detroit, where the children where pelted with rocks, received threatening phone calls and had a cross burned on the lawn,” May said. Ms. Liuzzo’s husband never was able to get over the murder, and the family gradually disintegrated. “In some ways, the Liuzzos never recovered,” May said. Tony Liuzzo joined the Michigan Militia in 1996 and, after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and the subsequent passage of the U.S. Patriot Act, went into hiding. His brother, Tom, was hospitalized for mental illness and today lives alone in rural Alabama, not far from where his mother died. He has no contact with the family. Where Viola Liuzzo was looking for fulfillment through her participation in the crusade that was the civil rights movement, May said he believes Rowe was looking for fulfillment through a connection to law enforcement. “In many ways, Rowe was a very disreputable character,” May said. “He was a high school drop out, a boozer and a womanizer.”
Before becoming an FBI informant, Rowe had expressed disdain for the KKK. He enjoyed police work and often rode on patrol with Birmingham, Ala., officers, although his lack of education made a career in the field impossible. Rowe came to the attention of the FBI in April 1960, when the bureau learned someone had been having barroom discussions in which he claimed to be a government agent. It was a charge the bureau, then under the watchful eye of J. Edgar Hoover, took very seriously. The FBI discovered the braggart was Rowe, who had friends on both the police force and in the KKK. Because the bureau was interested in infiltrating the Klan, Rowe seemed a ready-made candidate for undercover work. For Rowe, the opportunity to become a government agent was the high point of his life, and he signed on with the Eastview Klavern No. 13 of the Alabama Ku Klux Klan, one of the most dangerous and notorious units of the KKK. To prove his loyalty to distrusting Klansmen, who long suspected him of being an agent for the government, Rowe began to participate in acts of violence. His actions were often questioned but generally overlooked because of the information he was providing to the bureau. In 1961, Rowe passed along information that the Birmingham police department had asked the Klan to give a most severe lesson to Freedom Riders, who were traveling by bus to the city on Mother’s Day to test newly mandated integration in the South. The police had agreed to stand by for a 15-minute time period before responding as the Klan beat Freedom Riders in a bus terminal. The information made its way up the chain of command to Hoover himself, who chose to keep it a secret, not even informing Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy. When the bloody attack got under way, Rowe was at the heart of it and in fact was caught on film by a newspaper photographer. Two years later, Rowe was suspected of either having involvement in or knowing in advance of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing that killed four young girls. He claimed ignorance but May said that is not credible. “Rowe knew a lot about everything going on,” the author said. Suspicions aside, the FBI continued to maintain Rowe as an informant into 1965, when his path crossed with that of Ms. Liuzzo on the fateful day of March 25, 1965. Ms. Liuzzo had been participating in a landmark Voting Rights March from Selma to Montgomery that ended with a rousing speech by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. When the march ended without incident, President Lyndon B. Johnson was relieved. On the return to Selma that evening, however, Ms. Liuzzo provided a ride to a young African American, Leroy Moton, and when they were spotted together by a carload of Klansmen, including Rowe, gunfire erupted, leaving Ms. Liuzzo dead at the wheel of her Oldsmobile and a slightly wounded Moton running for help and fearing for his life. The slaying stunned Johnson, shocked the nation and help lead to the passage of the Voting Rights Act. In poring through public statements and court records, working to separate fact from FBI disinformation and Rowe’s own grandiose misrepresentations, May has concluded that Rowe’s presence in the murder car that night encouraged his Klan brothers to shoot Ms. Liuzzo. He believes that Rowe did not fire the fatal shot but that he led his fellow Klansmen to chase down her car. The book covers in detail the murder trials that resulted from the Liuzzo killing and the impact the tragic event had both on the Liuzzo family and on Rowe. May also said he believes that the Liuzzo story suggests that the use of informants in the war against terrorism “is very dangerous because their actions often cause the very violence they are supposed to prevent.” Article by Neil Thomas To learn how to subscribe to UDaily, click here. |
|
|
