| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Informant: The FBI, the Ku Klux Klan, and the Murder of Viola Liuzzo. By Gary May. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005. xvi, 431 pp. $35.00, ISBN 0-300-10635-1.)

Gary May's The Informant is a riveting account of a bizarre tale and a solid work of investigative history. The author retells the story of Tommy Rowe, a dairy factory employee recruited by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in 1960 to infiltrate the Ku Klux Klan in Birmingham, Alabama. Rowe, a rowdy bruiser and "cop buff," had all the qualities of a perfect Klansman and a perfect informant. As May explains, the FBI recognized that "the most productive informants" were "criminally inclined"; FBI director J. Edgar Hoover preferred career criminals, or "double crossers," as he called them (p. 4). Charged with avoiding violence, Rowe reported on Klan activities while participating in those same activities; his involvement in "missionary work," as the Klan euphemistically called its assaults on "outside agitators" who threatened the "southern way of life," implicated him in the 1965 murder of Viola Liuzzo, a white housewife from Detroit, Michigan, killed while shuttling civil rights activists between Selma and Montgomery.

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