Michael
Donald was
born in Mobile, Alabama, in 1962. He attending a local trade school
and worked part-time at the Mobile
Press Register.
In
1981 the trial of
Josephus Andersonan, an African American charged with the murder of
a white policeman, took place in Mobile. At the end of the case the
jury was unable to reach a verdict. This upset members of the Ku
Klux Klan who believed that the reason for this was that some
members of the jury were African Americans. At a meeting held after
the trial, Bennie Hays, the second-highest ranking official in the
Klan in Alabama said: "If a black man can get away with killing
a white man, we ought to be able to get away with killing a black
man."
On Saturday 21st March, 1981, Bennie Hays's son, Henry Hays, and James
Knowles, decided they would get revenge for the failure of the courts
to convict the man for killing a policeman. They travelled around
Mobile in their car until they found nineteen year old Donald walking
home. After forcing him into
the car Donald was taken into the next county where he was lynched.
A brief investigation took place and eventually
the local police claimed that Donald had been murdered as a result
of a disagreement over a drugs deal. Donald's mother, Beulah
Mae Donald, who knew that her son was not involved with drugs, was
determined to obtain justice. She contacted Jessie
Jackson who came to Mobile and led a protest march about the failed
police investigation.
Thomas Figures, the assistant United States attorney in Mobile, managed
to persuade the Federal Bureau of Investigation
(FBI) to look into the case. James Bodman was sent to Mobile and it
did not take him long to persuade James Knowles to confess to the
killing of Michael Donald.
In June 1983, Knowles was found guilty of violating Donald's civil
rights and was sentenced to life imprisonment. Six months later, when
Henry Hays was tried for murder, Knowles appeared as chief prosecution
witness. Hays was found guilty and sentenced to death.
With the support of Morris Dees and Joseph
J. Levin at the Southern Poverty Law Centre
(SPLC), Beulah Mae Donald decided that she would use this case to
try and destroy the Ku Klux Klan in Alabama.
Her civil suit against the United Klans of America took place in February
1987. The all-white jury found the Klan responsible for the lynching
of Michael Donald and ordered it to pay 7 million dollars. This resulted
the Klan having to hand over all its assets including its national
headquarters in Tuscaloosa.
After a long-drawn out legal struggle, Henry Hayes was executed on
6th June, 1997. It was the first time a white man had been executed
for a crime against an African American since 1913.
The lynching of Michael Donald
(1)
The trial of James Knowles in June, 1983.
James Knowles: I've lost my family.
I've got people after me now. Everything I said is true. I was acting
as a Klansman when I done this. And I hope people learn from my mistake.
I do hope you decide a judgement against me and everyone else involved.
(Turning towards Beulah Mae Donald.) I can't bring your son back.
God knows if I could trade places with him, I would. I can't. Whatever
it takes - I have nothing. But I will have to do it. And if it takes
me the rest of my life to pay it, any comfort it may bring, I hope
it will.
Beulah
Mae Donald: I do forgive you. From the day I found out
who you all was, I asked God to take care of you all, and he has.
(2)
Jesse KornBluth, A Mother's Justice, the Sunday
Times (31st January, 1988)
From its new headquarters the
SPLC undertook in 1984 its biggest anti-Klan project - using Mrs Donald's
civil suit to dismantle Robert Shelton's branch of the Klan. Sheldon's
men had been involved in the beating of Freedom Riders at the Birmingham
bus station in 1961, in the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in
Birmingham in 1963 and in the shooting of Viola Liuzzo near Selma
in 1965.
(3)
Frances
Coleman, Mobile Register (1st June, 1997)
June 6 will be a sad day for Alabamians,
whether their skins are white, black or brown. On that day -- the
previous night, really, at 12:01 a.m. -- the state of Alabama will
electrocute Henry Francis Hays for beating a black man to death 16
years ago, and then hanging his body from a tree.
The execution will rip the scab from the old, deep, nasty wound of
racism, which in the 20th-century South alternately heals and festers.
It will fester again this week as residents of the Heart of Dixie
re-live the brutal death of 19-year-old Michael Donald.
It is a story of contrasts: The murderer, a white man, grew up in
a home filled with hate and violence. The victim was reared by a loving
mother and doting older siblings.
Henry Hays knew what he was about that night, when he and a friend
set out to kill a black man. Michael Donald, on the other hand, was
innocently walking up the street on a spring evening in Mobile to
buy some cigarettes, when fate delivered him into the white men's
hands.
Most vivid, though, is the contrast between fiction and reality. Michael
Donald was murdered - beaten to death with a tree limb - not in the
1930s or '40s, even in the 1960s, but in 1981. Such things weren't
supposed to happen almost 30 years after the Supreme Court declared
"separate but equal'' unconstitutional, and nearly 20 years after
the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Nor were they supposed to happen in Mobile, which in the 1960s had
somehow managed to avoid the racial violence that erupted in Selma
and Birmingham.
Black men kidnapped and beaten, their bodies strung up in a tree?
That was something that happened on the dark back roads of Dallas
County or over in the Mississippi Delta, not in Alabama's second-largest
city.
But hate crimes aren't constrained by time, place or suppositions.
The reality is that Michael Donald died just 16 years ago at the hands
of two Ku Klux Klansmen. So what if his death came years after lynchings
were supposed to have ceased, and in a place not known for such things?
Barely out of childhood, he was a tragic, latter-day victim of a time
when it was safer to be white - when to be a black girl or woman was
to invite sexual violence, and to be a black boy or man was to evoke
daily disrespect, laced always with the potential for a fatal confrontation.
In the early hours of Friday morning, Henry Hays will pay for ending
Michael Donald's life that day in 1981. He claims that he is innocent
- death row residents generally say that - but the evidence shows
otherwise. Yet Hays is also a victim, albeit in a much different way
than Donald.
Reared by an abusive father who beat his sons mercilessly, he was
steered into a life of brutality and hate - a life that one day included
membership in the KKK. Hays learned little about love and less about
tolerance.
Death penalty advocates tout execution as a deterrent to crime, and
maybe it is in some respects. Henry Hays' death, though, will serve
mostly as a sad commentary on a society that in 1997 - less than three
years from the turn of the century - is having to electrocute a man
for murdering another man, solely because of the color of his skin.
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