The lynching of Michael Donald

This happened in 1981. A jury in Mobile had failed to convict a Black man accused of killing a white police officer, and members of the United Klans of America decided that a Black man should die for it. On the night of 21 March, Henry Hays and James Knowles drove around Mobile until they found someone walking alone: Michael Donald, nineteen, on his way back from buying cigarettes.

They forced him into the car, took him to another county, beat him with a tree limb, cut his throat and brought the body back to hang from a camphor tree on Herndon Avenue, across from Hays's house. Mobile police initially put it down to a drug deal. It took pressure from Donald's mother Beulah Mae Donald, and from the attorney Thomas Figures, to get a federal investigation.

Knowles pleaded guilty and testified. Hays was convicted and executed in 1997 - the first white man executed in Alabama for killing a Black person since 1913. Then Beulah Mae Donald sued the United Klans of America itself and won a $7 million judgment in 1987, which took the organisation's headquarters and bankrupted it; the UKA dissolved in 1992. She was awarded the building, sold it, and died two years later. The street where her son was hanged is now named for him.