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 .
down one of the longest-standing white supremacist domestic terrorist organizations that existed in the nation. think about this. 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. it s almost unimaginable .
people were just surprised of the courage that we had. not knowing that sometimes we had to cry at night because we didn t know. and we had to moan sometimes because we didn t know. but when we walked out, we presented ourselves as a family. in most prior cases where hate people were involved in it, they indict the hate people but not the leaders of the group. unless they could prove the leaders of the group had a plan to commit violent acts. and that s not easily said nor done. so for this trial i had to show that the united klan had a history of carrying out its white supremacy acts with violence. we started by the things that the klan had done and robert shelton, the leader, had been behind .
so they started calling late into the night, in the wee hours of the morning, to say, you know, we re going to come and get you. they just kept calling, kept calling, kept calling. they got fired up because we sued them. in 1983, the klan burned our building in montgomery, alabama. not only had our office been firebombed in the night by a klan group, morris lived at that time on a farm. they came to my house trying to track me down, and they found that i had security guards out there. they discovered on his property camouflaged klan people with high-powered assault rifles trying to sneak up to morris house. the neo-nazis and the ku klux klan are closely allied. both groups claim they have infiltrated military reserve units and can get their hands on a variety of sophisticated weapons. they had a hit list of people they wanted to kill. the hit list assigns value to targets. they included everything from killing a random person of
he said, if my association with the klan makes me guilty, i apologize for that. he never said, i committed this crime. we re about to close a chapter in what many call the last lynching in america. henry hayes has four and a half hours now to say his final goodbyes to his family and friends. i have no idea what i m fixing to go through. this guy only had numbers of years to realize to this point what s been happening to him. he had plenty of opportunities to correct himself, but he s a diehard klansman. so when we went to the execution, the news media came down and said, one of you all can go in. he said, i m going. stanley said, i m going in.