In 1981, 19-year-old Michael Donald's body was found dangling from a tree in Mobile. The murder, carried out by members of the Ku Klux Klan, is sometimes referred to as the last documented lynching in America.
Michael Donald in an undated photo.
But Donald's name isn't part of the new National Memorial for Peace and Justice, the Montgomery museum and memorial documenting America's history of racial violence and inequality. There are two reasons: timing and the outcome for the perpetrators.
The new memorial covers the span of 1877 to 1950, the period from Reconstruction in the years after the Civil War to the earliest days of the civil rights movement. It was a time of extreme racial violence and scant justice: EJI documented 4,084 racial terror lynchings in 12 Southern states during the period.
Donald's death took place decades after the marches through Montgomery and outside the timespan of the memorial.
The murder
On March 21, 1981, Donald was killed by Henry Hays and James Knowles, young KKK members incensed over the failure of a Mobile jury to convict an African American man charged with the murder of a white policeman.
Hays' father, Bennie Jack Hays, second-highest-ranking official in the United Klans in Alabama at the time, was furious over the failed conviction and told the men "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."
Spurred those words, Hays and Knowles kidnapped Donald, beat him, slit his throat and then hung his body from a tree in a Mobile neighborhood.
The aftermath of Donald's death is the key difference from the crimes documented in the lynching memorial. Racial lynchings are defined as unprosecuted murders that occurred at the hands of mobs or unidentified people. In the case of Donald's death, the perpetrators were prosecuted, and the convictions made history.
Police initially claimed Donald's death was over a drug deal gone bad, despite insistence from his mother, Beulah Mae Donald, that it wasn't true. Civil rights leader Jesse Jackson came to Mobile to lead protests; the FBI took over the investigation. Knowles later confessed to the murder, pleaded guilty and testified against Hays. Hays was sentenced to death and his 1997 execution in Alabama's electric chair was the first in the state since 1913 for a white-on-black crime.
A third defendant, Benjamin Franklin Cox Jr., of Mobile, was convicted of being an accomplice and sentenced to life in prison. The elder Hays, charged as an accomplice for allegedly ordering the lynching, had his first trial end in a mistrial, and died before a second trial started.
The criminal convictions weren't the end, however.
With the help of Morris Dees, co-founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center, Mrs. Donald filed a civil suit against the local KKK and the United Klans of America. An all-white Mobile jury awarded her $7 million, forcing the bankrupted KKK to turn over the deed to its $225,000 national headquarters in Tuscaloosa.
"The verdict marked the end of the United Klans, the same group that had beaten the Freedom Riders in 1961, murdered civil rights worker Viola Liuzzo in 1965, and bombed Birmingham's 16th Street Baptist Church in 1963," the Southern Poverty Law Center said in its description of the historic case.
Donald sold the headquarters for a little more than $50,000, allowing her to move from the projects and into her own home before her death a year later.