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The many deaths of Viola Liuzzo - 1965 murder of civil rights worker
National Review, July 10, 1995 by Jared Taylor
THIS year marks the thirtieth anniversary of the march from Selma to Montgomery, one of the most effective demonstrations of the entire civil-rights era. It is also the anniversary of a sordid murder committed because of that march. The murder and its improbable aftermath make a fascinating story that throws light on two very contemporary questions: Should the FBI infiltrate radical organizations? And, Can the jury system handle high-profile cases with a racial angle? On March 25, 1965, the Selma-to-Montgomery march for black voting rights had come to a triumphant close.
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That evening, a woman from Michigan named Viola Liuzzo, who was shuttling demonstrators from Montgomery back to housing in Selma, was killed by a volley of bullets fired from a passing car. Viola Liuzzo, as it happens, was just the sort of ``Northern meddler'' whom segregationists despised. The 39-year-old woman was thrice married and mentally unstable, and she had needle marks in her arms when she died. Although she had once registered, she had never voted; segregationists pointed out that she was demanding a right for blacks that she herself had never exercised. President Lyndon Johnson took an intense interest in the case. Within 24 hours of her death he had gone on television and radio with FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover at his side to announce the arrest of four suspects, all members of the Ku Klux Klan. Johnson heaped praise on ``the very fast and always efficient work of the special agents of the FBI who worked all night long, starting immediately after the tragic death of Mrs. Viola Liuzzo.'' He heaped abuse on the Klan, and urged Congress to mount a full-scale investigation of its activities -- a charge that was promptly accepted by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Johnson did not mention that the crime had been solved with such miraculous speed because one of the arrested Klansmen, Gary Rowe, was a paid FBI informer. Collie Wilkins, the alleged trigger-man, was tried in a segregated courtroom in Hayneville, Alabama. He was defended by Matt Murphy, ``Imperial Klonsel'' (general counsel) of the United Klans of America. Imperial Klonsel Murphy made much of the fact that the state's case depended almost entirely on the testimony of a paid informer who had broken his oath of loyalty to the Klan and had betrayed his brothers. ``What kind of man is this,'' he thundered, ``who comes into a fraternal order by hook and crook, takes the sacred oath, and sells his soul for 30 pieces of silver?'' Arguing before an all-white, all-male jury, Murphy also tried to make white supremacy and segregation the central questions rather than guilt or innocence. ``I'm proud of my heritage; I'm proud that I am a white man,'' he shouted in his closing argument. ``I'm for white supremacy. The Communists and the niggers have taken us over.'' In the end, the panel deadlocked, with two jurors holding out against conviction on manslaughter charges. Wilkins was retried in October 1965. Interest in the case was heightened, if that could be possible, by the HUAC Klan hearings, which started on almost the same day. Kleagles, Kludds, and Kligrapps testified before a Klan-happy Washington press while the out-of-town corps descended once again upon Hayneville. This time, the prosecutor tried to show that some prospective jurors were racist by asking them whether they believed that Negroes, and white integrationists like Mrs. Liuzzo, were inferior to themselves. Although 11 of 30 prospective jurors said that they did believe this, they also claimed they could fairly consider the evidence and impose the death penalty on a man who had killed an ``inferior'' civil-rights worker. The judge ruled that the men were fit jurors. There were six blacks in the jury pool, but they were all disqualified for various reasons; the resulting panel was all white. Murphy had died in a car crash shortly after the first trial, so Arthur Hanes, former mayor of Birmingham, conducted the defense. Rowe, the informant, once again swore that Wilkins had fired the fatal shots. But he admitted that he had held a gun out the car window and pretended to shoot. For the defense, Hanes referred to the informer as a ``Judas goat'' and the alleged trigger-man as a ``scapegoat,'' and called the trial the ``Parable of Two Goats.'' Hanes also managed to find two alibi witnesses, who testified that they had seen Wilkins drinking beer at a VFW Hall near Birmingham, 125 miles from the murder scene, an hour or less after Viola Liuzzo was shot. In his closing argument, Hanes gave no sermons about segregation or white supremacy but concentrated on the ``Judas goat,'' who, he said, ``sells information for money. If there is no information, he makes -- he fabricates -- information and then he goes and peddles it.'' Wilkins was acquitted. The three Klansmen were then retried for the same crime on federal conspiracy charges. The expected double-jeopardy arguments were quashed. Once again, an all-white jury was empaneled. The arguments were the same, but this time the results were dramatically different: The jurors, mostly from small Alabama towns, found all three men guilty, and the judge imposed the maximum sentence of ten years. One of the three Klansmen died of a heart attack not long afterward, but Collie Wilkins and Eugene Thomas served full terms in federal prison. The legal drama was far from over. Thomas, fresh from the guilty verdict in federal court, was tried in state court on murder charges in 1966. In the same Hayneville courthouse, he was acquitted by a jury of eight blacks and four whites. ``Jury With Negroes Acquits Klansman in Liuzzo Slaying,'' was the surprised headline in the New York Times. The case lay dormant until 1978, when it resurfaced during investigations of the FBI's covert Internal Security Counterintelligence Program, known as COINTELPRO. By now, J. Edgar Hoover was dead, and the program that had hired Rowe was under intense scrutiny, mainly for its infiltration of leftist organizations. Much was revealed about Rowe, a former bartender and nightclub bouncer. The FBI thought he would make a plausible Klansman and asked him to join the Klan as a spy. Rowe was the agency's top informer there for years, partly because he threw himself so enthusiastically into Klan work. The 1978 investigations implicated him as an agent provocateur, and he was accused of helping plant the bomb that killed four black girls in a Birmingham church in 1963. Wilkins and Thomas, now out of jail, walked away from their beer-drinking alibi and claimed they had seen Rowe kill Viola Liuzzo. Rowe repeated his story that he had only pretended to shoot her. The Alabama district attorney thought otherwise. In November 1978, a grand jury indicted Rowe for first-degree murder in the killing of Viola Liuzzo. The state initiated extradition proceedings against Rowe, who was living in Georgia, where the FBI had given him a new identity under the witness-protection program. In 1980, while Rowe was still fighting extradition, things got worse for him. An internal FBI file came to light which acknowledged that Rowe had led attacks on Freedom Riders, clubbing them with a lead-weighted baseball bat. The FBI paid the medical bills for Rowe's own injuries and gave him a $125 bonus. One of his FBI handlers was found to have said, ``If he happened to be with some Klansmen and they decided to do something [violent] he couldn't be an angel and be a good informant.'' Viola Liuzzo's children now waded in, smelling money. With the help of the ACLU, they sued the FBI for $2 million, charging that Rowe and, therefore, the Bureau were at least partly responsible for the death of their mother. Luckily for Rowe, in October 1980 a federal judge blocked extradition to Alabama, saying that a federal ``agent'' has rights that protect him when ``placed in a compromising position because of his undercover work.'' This surprising ruling, which exempted Rowe from any number of possible criminal charges in Alabama, was sustained by the federal appeals court. The Liuzzo children did manage to get Rowe into court in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 1982. Eugene Thomas repeated his 1978 allegations that the informer was Mrs. Liuzzo's killer. The judge disbelieved Thomas. He threw out the Liuzzo children's case, ordering them to reimburse the government the $80,000 it had spent defending itself. The saga of the Liuzzo murder seems -- finally -- to have come to its sorry end, but there are lessons here. One is that the jury system, admirable as it may be in a homogeneous society, can crack under racial pressure. At least one of the four men who drove by Viola Liuzzo's car that evening fired the shots that killed her. All four may have been guilty of murder. There is only one thing that kept the state from getting a conviction: race. The other lesson is that FBI infiltrators can cause a great deal of trouble, and leave mysteries that are never cleared up. In order to be accepted by the bad guys, they have to encourage people to break the law, or at least not discourage them, and they may sometimes break it themselves. It is always a temptation for infiltrators to encourage vicious behavior that they can then gloriously expose. And some, like Rowe, develop a taste for the very crimes they are supposed to help prevent.
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