there s a difference between what you know and what you can prove. the investigation was evolving. bob eddy was on the case. he was interviewing people. he never took his foot off the gas. agent bodman, under the direction of thomas figures, was out there interviewing klansmen. we knew who committed this crime. we, however, could not prove it without a break. i never once thought that i was not being looked at seriously as a suspect. law enforcement started to zero in on us more and more. i was bound and determined that i wasn t gonna talk to nobody. they were building that narrative, and i just wasn t going to give anybody the satisfaction. everybody thought i was
advise them to take the fifth amendment, and so they testified before the grand jury. when you re interviewed about a murder before a federal grand jury, you re gonna be uncomfortable. thomas figures was a grinder. in this case, simply tenacious. thomas figures was really wanting to have me locked up. 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 d 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
been framed by the communists. because a communist don t pick, only if you re in their way. right now, i m in their way. i m the one they re picking on. to get to me, they got my son. how could a klansman living on a rundown farm in a rural part of mobile country come up with the money to hire one of the best defense attorneys 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.
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? how much time? the body of a black man has been found hanging from a tree in mobile, alabama. lynching is a tool to control and oppress black people. racialized violence is as old as the constitution. klans are not running around with white sheets over their head, but it s still happening. today, people are horrified of the police. it s the modern-day lynching. what are we going to do about it?
would have known. testifying for the prosecution, james tiger knowles, pointed at his fellow ku klux klansman, henry hays, and said that together, they killed 19-year-old michael donald in march, 1981, because he was black. the klan wanted the message to get back to the black people of not just of alabama, of the whole united states, that we would not stand for a black person killing a white police officer and getting away with it, especially in alabama. we had gotten the rope, and 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