Selma And The Liuzzo Murder Trials

A fascinating examination of the Viola Liuzzo trials, with a foreword by Ari Berman

Extensive and meticulous research marks the first full-length look at the life, murder, and legacy of Viola Liuzzo, a civil rights worker murdered by the Klan in 1965, whose memory was defamed by J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI. UP.

Presents the life of the civil rights worker who was murdered shortly after the 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, and discusses the rights of Afro-Americans living in the South prior to and following her death.

An FBI’s informant’s role in the murder of a civil rights activist by the KKK is explored in this “suspenseful and vigorously reported” history (Baltimore Sun). 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.

Examining racial segregation from 1920s to the 1970s this book explores the grassroots workers who maintained the system of racial segregation. For decades white women performed duties that upheld white over black: censoring textbooks, deciding on the racial identity of their neighbors, celebrating school choice, and lobbying elected officials. They instilled beliefs in racial hierarchies in their children, built national networks, and experimented with a color-blind political discourse. White women's segregationist politics stretched across the nation, overlapping with and shaping the rise of the New Right.

"The Case for the Prosecution in the Ciceronian Era is primarily a work of history, as it aims to shed light on what was actually said in these ancient trials. To accomplish that goal, it also draws on classical rhetorical theory and Roman law. By systematically considering a large number of trials, the book offers a corrective to the dominance of Ciceronian defense speeches in the study of ancient Roman criminal trials."--Jacket.

A Booklist Editor's Choice A Parents' Choice Gold Award A Eureka! Nonfiction Children's Book Award Honor Book Jonathan Daniels, a white seminary student from New Hampshire, traveled to Selma, Alabama, in 1965 to help with voter registration of black residents. After the voting rights marches, he remained in Alabama, in the area known as "Bloody Lowndes," an extremely dangerous area for white freedom fighters, to assist civil rights workers. Five months later, Jonathan Daniels was shot and killed while saving the life of Ruby Sales, a black teenager. Through Daniels's poignant letters, papers, photographs, and taped interviews, authors Rich Wallace and Sandra Neil Wallace explore what led Daniels to the moment of his death, the trial of his murderer, and how these events helped reshape both the legal and political climate of Lowndes County and the nation.

For more than a century, the city of Atlanta has been associated with black achievement in education, business, politics, media, and music, earning it the nickname "the black Mecca." Atlanta's long tradition of black education dates back to Reconstruction, and produced an elite that flourished in spite of Jim Crow, rose to leadership during the civil rights movement, and then took power in the 1970s by building a coalition between white progressives, business interests, and black Atlantans. But as Maurice J. Hobson demonstrates, Atlanta's political leadership--from the election of Maynard Jackson, Atlanta's first black mayor, through the city's hosting of the 1996 Olympic Games--has consistently mishandled the black poor. Drawn from vivid primary sources and unnerving oral histories of working-class city-dwellers and hip-hop artists from Atlanta's underbelly, Hobson argues that Atlanta's political leadership has governed by bargaining with white business interests to the detriment of ordinary black Atlantans. In telling this history through the prism of the black New South and Atlanta politics, policy, and pop culture, Hobson portrays a striking schism between the black political elite and poor city-dwellers, complicating the long-held view of Atlanta as a mecca for black people.