The Last Official Lynching: Michael Donald, March 21, 1981
While committing a robbery, Josephus Anderson murdered a white police officer in Birmingham, Alabama. Anderson’s lawyers were granted a change of venue and the trial moved to Mobile, Alabama. Members of Unit 900 of the United Klans of America declared that justice for the white officer would never happen because there was a black man on the jury. Their line of thinking was that a black man would never convict another black man for killing a white police officer.
A mistrial was declared. On the night of March 21, 1981, members of Unit 900 of the United Klans of America burned a large cross in front of the Mobile County courthouse. Two members of the Klan group were very upset and began driving around Mobile in search of a black person to attack. Henry Hays and James Knowles were armed with a gun and a rope when they happened upon Michael Donald who was walking home from purchasing a pack of cigarettes for his sister.
Hays and Knowles motioned to ask Donald directions to a night club. When Donald approached the car, he was forced at gunpoint to get inside. The men drove the car to the next county into a secluded and wooded area. When Donald attempted to escape by running away, he was caught and beaten with a tree branch. As Hays tied a rope around Donald’s neck, Knowles continued to beat Donald with the tree branch.
Working together, the two men pulled Michael Donald’s body up over a tree limb. There his beaten body hung from the tree until all life left it. To ensure that Michael Donald was dead, Henry Hays cut the man’s neck three times. The body was left hanging from a tree in a mixed-race neighborhood in Mobile.
The Mobile police and the FBI investigated the lynching. Both concluded that Michael Donald was hung as a result of a drug deal gone bad. Donald’s mother insisted that her son had nothing to do with drugs and asked for prominent civil rights leaders to assist in getting to the bottom of her son’s murder. Just before the FBI was to close the case, Rev. Jesse Jackson and other civil rights activists demanded that the investigation remain open, which it did.
Eventually, Hays and Knowles were convicted of the murder of Michael Donald. In 1984, the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Alabama, filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the United Klans of America. The case was filed in the federal court in the Southern District of Alabama. An all-white jury heard the civil liability case against the United Klans of America. In 1987, the jury awarded $7 million in the wrongful-death case to the Donald family.
The payout by the United Klans of America bankrupted the organization. The Michael Donald wrongful-death lawsuit was the first civil liability suit directed specifically at an organization that professed hate based solely on race. Setting a precedent, the lawsuit opened the door for others to file civil cases against hate groups and their members in the United States.