Who was Michael Donald? Brutally beaten and strangled by Ku Klux Klan, his mother Beulah Mae fights for justice
The body of 19-year-old Michael Donald was found hanging from a tree in Mobile, Alabama in 1941. The murder, carried out by members of the Ku Klux Klan, is sometimes referred to as the last documented lynching in the United States of America. Now CNN has made a documentary called 'The People v The Klan' which highlights the heinous murder.
On March 21, 1981, members of KKK were grimly protesting, fueled with anger over the failure of a Mobile jury to convict an African American man who was charged with the murder of a white policeman. "If a Black man can get away with killing a white man," said Benny Hays, a high-ranking Klansman and the father of Henry Hays. "We ought to be able to get away with killing a Black man."
Donald was murdered that very night by Benny Hays's son Henry and James Knowles, young KKK members. It was a 20th-century lynching in the most brutal sense of the word and thanks to the historic civil lawsuit by Michael’s mother, Beulah Mae Donald, it would end up being the last.
RELATED ARTICLES
According to sociologists Stewart Emory Tolnay and EM Beck, who wrote 'A Festival of Violence', Michael Donald was different from some lynching victims. According to them, he was not accused of committing a crime or thought to have breached racial etiquette. Instead, he was killed because the Klan members were furious that the second trial of Josephus Anderson, a Black man accused of murdering a white policeman, had been declared a mistrial when the jury could not reach a verdict.
Enraged with the verdict, Klan members, Hays and Knowles, chose Donald at random, tracked him down, beat him brutally, then strangled him to death. They showed him off at a house party of Klan elder Bennie Hays’ that night before hanging his body from a tree on the residential Herndon Avenue. Donald was stopped by two White men in a vehicle asking for directions. It was a ruse, once Donald paused to help, one of the men produced a gun and forced Donald into their car. The two men then took him to a secluded location where they beat him, strangled him and cut his throat. They then took his body back to a residential area of Mobile, where they hung his body from a tree.
Donald, who was "thoughtful and responsible" and used to work late nights, stepped out around 11 pm to pick up cigarettes when he got murdered. As the hours grew with no sign of him, "everybody assumed that he'd gone home to my mom", her sister Cecelia Perry said. Donald was the youngest child of Beulah Mae, he worked in the mailroom of the Mobile Press-Register and was studying to be a brick mason.
Her sister also said: "He spent his last night alive with his family, watching a basketball game." "We were all gathered at my oldest sister's house, Betty," Perry recalls. "We would always sit around on Friday night 'cause she lived right around the corner from my mom. My niece Vanessa said, 'I need some cigarettes' and Michael said, 'I'll walk up there and get 'em'."
When the police arrived on the scene, Donald's wallet was found in a dumpster, with an ID card inside identifying the body that hung on Herndon Avenue as Michael Anthony Donald. "Nobody saw anything, nobody heard anything," former Mobile homicide detective Wilbur Williams says in the CNN series. "We just started investigating everything we could."
In 1983, two years after his murder, the police arrested Hays, the son of Alabama’s second-highest-ranking Klan official, and Knowles, who immediately confessed the crime to the FBI. Knowles was the lead witness in Hays’ trial, and both men were convicted and sentenced, Knowles to life in prison for violating Michael’s civil rights, Hays to death for murder. It was the first time since 1913 that a white man was given the death sentence for killing a Black man in Alabama.
Beulah Mae's lawyer, Sen Michael Figures, along with Morris Dees, the co-founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center, filed an over $10 million civil suit against the United Klans of America and others. After hearing Donald's case, an all-White jury granted a $7 million judgment. The sum was so significant that it effectively bankrupted the United Klans of America, which was known as one of the largest and most violent KKK factions.
"I wanted to know who all really killed my child,'' Beulah Mae said in response, according to The New York Times. ''I wasn't even thinking about the money. If I hadn't gotten a cent, it wouldn't have mattered. I wanted to know how and why they did it.'' She died at the age of 67 and before her death, she was honored by Ms Magazine as the publication's 1987 Woman of the Year. Her survivors include four daughters: Mary A Houston of Jackson, Miss; and Cecelia Perry, Cynthia Mitchell and Betty J Wyatt, all of Mobile, and two sons, Stanley Donald of Biloxi, Miss, and Leo Donald of Detroit.
Herndon Avenue, the street where Donald's body was found hanged, was renamed in his honor around 25 years after his death.
The first two episodes of 'The People v The Klan' will premiere on Sunday, April 11, at 9 pm ET/PT. The final two episodes will premiere on Sunday, April 18, starting at 9 pm ET/PT. Each episode will stream live for subscribers via CNNgo and will be available on-demand the day following its premiere.