The Michael Donald Case and the Klan's Reckoning
Near Mobile, Alabama
On the night of March twenty-first, nineteen eighty-one, a nineteen-year-old named Michael Donald left his home in Mobile to buy a pack of cigarettes. He did not come back. Two members of Unit Nine Hundred of the United Klans of America, Henry Francis Hays and James Knowles, abducted him at gunpoint, beat him, and hanged his body from a camphor tree on Herndon Avenue. The motive, as later established in court, was retaliation for a Birmingham jury's failure to convict a Black defendant of killing a white police officer. Bennie Jack Hays, Henry's father and the second-ranking official in the organization, had reportedly argued that if a Black man could go free after killing a white man, they should be able to kill a Black man and go free in return.
Michael Donald was the last recorded lynching in the United States.
In nineteen eighty-three, investigators arrested Henry Hays and James Knowles. Knowles pleaded guilty and cooperated with prosecutors. Henry Hays was convicted of murder and sentenced to death. He was executed in Alabama's electric chair on June sixth, nineteen ninety-seven.
Beulah Mae Donald, Michael's mother, then contacted Morris Dees of the Southern Poverty Law Center. In nineteen eighty-seven, a civil jury awarded her seven million dollars in damages against the United Klans of America. The organization could not pay. It was forced to turn over its national headquarters building in Tuscaloosa to satisfy the judgment. The United Klans of America, one of the largest and most violent Klan factions in the country, was effectively bankrupted by that verdict.
The legal strategy established in that case, holding an organization financially liable for the violent acts of its members, was subsequently applied against other hate groups across the country. A street in Mobile now carries Michael Donald's name.
