someone has taken a young man, hung him in a tree. who would do something this hideous? michael donald was an innocent good samaritan, not a thug. the mobile police department just didn t want to believe that mobile would still have klan in it. but they did. that s why we kept marching and protesting, letting them know we were going to take this lion down. the admitted klansmen turned to action as the words, guilty of capital murder, sank in. it was the first time since at least the early 1900s that a white had been sentenced to death for a crime committed against a black person in the state of alabama. beulah mae donald is grieving, but also seeking justice for her child. this is a black woman who s just lost her son to lynching. finds the strength to move forward in a civil suit against the klan in alabama. the stakes could not be higher. the body of a black man has been found hanging from a tree in mobile, alabama. lynching is a tool to control and oppr
and when he went in, henry hays looked at him and said, will you forgive me? and he said, i forgive you. 42-year-old henry hays died in alabama s electric chair early this morning after refusing a last meal. and i think we cried all the way back home from home and prison. we cried all the way back home because we knew that chapter was finally over. nobody wins when it s like that, because two families have been destroyed over a simple act of pure hatred. at some point, benny felt some guilt because he knew that he probably had cost that boy his life. my biggest regret is never having tried benny hays. the trial ended in a mistrial
his top officials were behind and promoted the killing. some of the conspirators were high-ranking officers in the united klan. in fact, benny hayes was the second or third highest-ranking klansman in that organization in the state at the time of the murder. benny, he gave the orders. he manipulated these young people. tiger knowles was 17 years old at the time. benny hayes was just as culpable and should have been held just as accountable. and all of that together went to show the pattern of violence that this group had encouraged around the time that the michael donald lynching took place .
According to sociologists Stewart Emory Tolnay and EM Beck, who wrote A Festival of Violence , Michael Donald was different from some lynching victims. According to them, he was not accused of committing a crime or thought to have breached racial etiquette. Instead, he was killed because the Klan members were furious that the second trial of Josephus Anderson, a Black man accused of murdering a white policeman, had been declared a mistrial when the jury could not reach a verdict.
Enraged with the verdict, Klan members, Hays and Knowles, chose Donald at random, tracked him down, beat him brutally, then strangled him to death. They showed him off at a house party of Klan elder Bennie Hays’ that night before hanging his body from a tree on the residential Herndon Avenue. Donald was stopped by two White men in a vehicle asking for directions. It was a ruse, once Donald paused to help, one of the men produced a gun and forced Donald into their car. The two men then took him to a seclu