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? we move forward with people deciding i m bold enough, and i m going to make it change. beulah mae donald took on one of the most violent criminal organizations in the united states. this is an incredible story of courage. the body of a black man has been found hanging from a tree in mobile, alabama. living in mobile was a quiet town. it s nothing but old trees. but after march 1981, it was kind of, like, creepy to me to just look at the trees. the hurt is still there. the hurt my mom went through, i just visualize her face and i go, like, i can t talk about it today. my mama, beulah mae donald, was a quiet woman. she was a good-hearted person. all the neighbor
personality. she volunteered her time working with children. a model mother. michael was my brother. michael was well-loved. he was quiet. he worked at night, and he kept my oldest son during the daytime. michael was a well-mannered and a polite young man. michael is a true example that hard work pays off. the housing project we lived in, everybody knew each other and this family cooked. we ate from them, and if my mom cooked, they ate from us. there was gangs and stuff back then, but we didn t get involved in it. my mom was always sitting on the porch waiting on us to arrive home from school. if he came home and i was lying down, he d do, you know, little things to help. that s the kind of boy he was. we didn t know nothing about the world and what the world was doing out there.
basketball game. michael donald was last seen at 11 o clock friday night here, the home of his aunt. at 11:00 p.m., he had some conversation with his sister. he said, i have a dollar; i m going to get a pack of cigarettes. and he was headed to a service station that was just a few blocks away. that was the last time he was seen. nobody saw anything. nobody heard anything. we just started investigating everything we could. the midnight shift officers that had discovered the body started relating all of the incidents that occurred throughout the night. there was an issue with a taxi driver that would not respond to his dispatcher. he was last reported on herndon avenue. someone burned a small cross at the back of the courthouse
was. michael donald was an innocent, good samaritan. not a thug. so we obtained permission to search michael s room, and basically found nothing in his bedroom. we knew the kind of young man he was. we knew the kind of family he had. some people were trying to say that we don t think it s an issue that has anything to do with violation of civil rights. we don t think it has anything to do with race. we think that was something, a drug deal that went bad or something. we knew that wasn t the case. you couldn t convince anybody in the black community. so we had to just live and walk through it, because we knew that he was just an innocent person. he was innocent in this. they tried to deviate from the truth to take the attention from what really happened.
took on the responsibility of reporting, investigating, and pressing the case on behalf michael donald. this precipitated the anger, the outrage, the fear of the klan. the klan actually called the new times office and requested a subscription to the paper. that was one of their moves in terms of keeping a constant threat, to say, you know, we re going to come and get you. and michael did not back down. on the morning of march 21st, 1981, michael went down to see for himself what was going on. and he took pictures of everybody at the scene that he could. there were a group of people right across the street from where it took place and these guys were just sitting there, smoking cigarettes, talking like