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
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
grandfatherly with a cane, but capable of sudden outbursts of anger. you get off me, son of a bitch. hit a dog. benny jack was a terrible man and i don t like speaking ill of the dead, but he was pure evil. and he was coming up herndon avenue, fussing and raising cain, talking about i own all of these houses, what the blank you doing keeping me from coming to my properties. and he was just loud-mouthed. i think there are certain parts of mobile that feared him all the way to his death. they knew that it was the klan. and we knew that that element was in the community and it was a dangerous situation, as far as we were concerned. nobody at that point had any answers. we thought that an independent
ralph told them that he had quote jumped a black dude. and ralph has a spot of blood this big on his t-shirt, and one of the edgar boys is literally cleaning blood out from under his fingernails with a pocket knife. this was evidence that was piling up, so four days later we arrested and charged them for the murder of michael donald. we have them in jail. we re starting to pick up pieces here and there. we determined that there had been a burglary that had occurred at the end of herndon avenue. when we finally figured out who the burglar was, he admits that he saw two guys fighting with a black guy at the tree. they weren t fighting.
downtown during the early part of the night, and then a domestic squabble had actually occurred over on dolphin street, which is three blocks away. there were three male subjects involved, ralph eugene hayes, and jimmy and johnny edgar. mr. hayes had failed to come home from work that evening. hayes lived at 115 herndon avenue. simply because of the proximity, we obtained permission to search and that was when we found a gun, a knife, a picture of a hangman s noose hanging in a tree. we brought them to police headquarters downtown and questioned them. and then all of a sudden, a character surfaced by the name of johnny ray kelly. mr. kelly said that on friday night, he was five blocks west of herndon avenue on spring hill, and he said, i was standing out here and up walked jimmy, johnny, and ralph. kelly claimed that he observed blood on ralph hayes s clothes.