us stronger. and i believe that these type of attacks in many ways will strengthen our movement. the old way of activism was a problem because the michael donald case really brought down that model of organizing. the klan becomes one strand of a broad and intertwined social movement that brought together klansmen, neo-nazis, white separatists, christian identity proponents, and other followers of white religious theologies. later on, it brought in skinheads, militiamen, and it brought people together in a much more violent and revolutionary way than they had organized their violence under shelton and the uka. forward to the battlefield, my fellow texans! white victory! white victory! we don t need to be in the same group. at this point in the history of the klan in the united states, it would be against our interest to totally combine.
around? when these two klansmen were identified as killers, the old man, bennie jack hays, he hired a klansman to burn his house down so he could hire a prominent attorney to defend his son in the state trial. he did burn the house. he got an insurance settlement. he used that to pay the lawyer for his son, henry hays. bennie jack hays raised enough money to hire one of the best criminal lawyers, m.a. bubba marsal. the defense was to attempt to discredit tiger, because mr. marsal argued that tiger had cut his deal to save his life and therefore would say anything that he was told to say.
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 crime scene was in the same block where this group of klan lived. what better place to start? the mobile police department just didn t want to believe that mobile would still have klan in it, but they did. we felt the cops and the klan were working hand-in-hand. ain t gonna tolerate this. thomas figures, he s in a position to push and nudge and make sure that this case does not rest from a criminal standpoint. i stuck to the klansmen. the more i asked questions, the more they talked. tiger knowles finally cracked. and he names henry hays. gotcha. got him, man, got him. so, when we think about michael donald, how long will it take for his family to get justice? how many years? how many decades?
they kept pushing that point, pushing that point. it makes the pot boil. i was saying the same thing over and over and over again. they often contradicted one another, and they would back up, and they would acknowledge things they hadn t acknowledged before. the klansmen lied. we knew they lied, so we brought them back a second time. and then you d go back to somebody else that said, well, this man just told us this. you better tell us the truth now, and then they d tell you more. and then some of them lied a second time, and we brought them back a third time. it was a game at that point between the accused and the powers that were trying to convict me or henry or tiger or teddy or benny jack. and you could just begin to see the evidence start developing, the kind of evidence you would need to have a successful prosecution. thomas was a prosecutor. he was dedicated to that, very dedicated to it.
officer and getting away with it, especially in alabama. we d gotten the rope, we got the gun, and then i tied the hangman s noose in henry s car. we were out on a hunt. that s what we were doing. we were hunting. we were hunting black people. klansmen said that they were out hunting black people and they came upon michael donald and killed him. they literally mean they were out hunting black people. just go watch the tape of what happened to ahmaud arbery when they killed him on the streets in georgia. watch men, who are not police officers, who have no authority, drive around and literally corner off this young man, and then shoot him with a shotgun in his hand, in his body.