6 – The Murder of Michael Donald – 1981
The death of Michael Donald has the infamous distinction of being the last ‘recorded’ lynching in America. It was yet another sickening chapter in the race hate crimes committed by the KKK, and while justice took a long time coming, at least in this case, some of the perpetrators were properly punished. Donald had the misfortune to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
In 1981, an African-American man named Josephus Anderson was charged with the murder of a policeman in Mobile, Alabama but the jury couldn’t reach a verdict. This angered Klan members who believed that Anderson only got away with it because there were black members of the jury. Even before the verdict, there was a meeting of the United Klans of America, and they resolved to get revenge. The organization’s #2, Bennie Jack Hays, supposedly 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.” While the Anderson case was declared a mistrial, he didn’t ‘get away’ with it at all. He was convicted of murder in 1985.
In any case, the Klan had already set their mind on murder and burned a three-foot cross on the lawn of the Mobile County courthouse on the night the mistrial was declared. Next, Hays’ son, Henry, and James Knowles started looking for a black person to attack. They spotted Donald walking home after buying his sister some cigarettes. The men pulled over and asked Donald for directions to a club, but when he approached, they forced him into their car at gunpoint.
Knowles and Hays drove outside the county and sought out a secluded wooded area. Donald knew what was coming so he tried to escape. He knocked the gun from Knowles’ hand and ran into the woods. Unfortunately, the two thugs caught Donald and started beating him with a tree limb. Hays proceeded to wrap a rope around Donald’s neck and pulled on it while Knowles continued beating the victim. After Donald stopped struggling, Hays finished him off by slitting his throat three times. Then, they left him hanging from a tree in a mixed-race neighborhood named Herndon Street, just across the road from Bennie Jack Hays’ house.
Local police tried to suggest that Donald was killed in a drug deal gone wrong but the FBI looked into the case, and it didn’t take long to get a confession out of Knowles. He was sentenced to life imprisonment in June 1983 while Hays was tried for murder in December that year. Knowles turned state’s witness, and Hays was found guilty and given the death penalty. He was executed in 1997; the first man to be executed for white-on-black crime since 1913 and the only execution of a Klan member for the death of an African-American in the 20th century. Donald’s mother won a civil case in 1987 and was awarded damages of $7 million.
