Street where Michael Donald was lynched by Klan in 1981 is renamed in his honor

Jet, June 19, 2006

The Mobile, AL, street where the body of a 19-year-old Black man, killed by members of the Ku Klux Klan, was found hanging from a tree has been renamed for the victim.

Herndon Avenue was renamed Michael Donald Avenue during a ceremony where Mayor Samuel L. Jones and District 2 Councilman William Carroll, who sponsored the resolution, officially dedicated the street. Family members of the slain teen attended the event.

In April, the Mobile City Council renamed Herndon Avenue to honor the lynched teen. After the request was made by family members of Donald, a petition was signed by residents of the street to approve the name change.

Michael Donald was on his way to a service station to get a pack of cigarettes when he was abducted from a Mobile street and driven to a remote area off Highway 225 in 1981.

It was later learned that Klansman Henry Francis Hays and James "Tiger" Knowles Jr. beat him unconscious with a tree limb. The two men then took Donald's body back to Mobile where they slipped a rope around his neck and strangled him. Hays slashed Donald's throat three times to make sure he was dead (Jet, Dec. 26, 1983).

Hays and Knowles, admitted Klansmen, were found guilty of the murder/ lynching in 1984 and sentenced to death and life imprisonment respectively (Jet, March 9, 1987). A third man, Frank Cox, Hays' brother-in-law, was sentenced to 99 years in prison for providing the rope to hang Donald.

Hays' father, Bennie Jack Hays, was charged in the murder but died before his trial.

In 1997, Hays, identified in court documents as an Exalted Cyclops in the KKK, became the first White in Alabama in 84 years to die for killing a Black (Jet, June 23, 1997). He was 42.

Prosecutors said Hays and accomplice Knowles drove around Mobile "looking for a Black man to hang" because they were angry that an interracial jury had failed to convict another Black man for killing a White police officer in Birmingham.

The Klansman selected Donald at random and lynched him to show Klan strength and scare Blacks from serving on juries.

In 1984, the Southern Poverty Law Center filed a civil suit on behalf of Donald's mother, Beulah Mae Donald, against the United Klans of America.

The case financially destroyed the United Klans in 1987 when the Tuscaloosa headquarters of the organization, at that time the nation's largest KKK group, was hit with a $7 million wrongful-death verdict (Jet, June 8, 1987).

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.

Because the organization had nowhere near $7 million in assets, it filed for bankruptcy and deeded its $250,000 headquarters near Tuscaloosa to the 67-year-old Mrs. Donald.

Michael, who family members once described as "quiet and very dependable," lived at home with his mother. Michael, who worked the night shift in the mailroom of the Mobile Press Register, wanted to be a brick mason and always promised to build his mother a home.

Mrs. Donald sold the Klan building awarded to her in the settlement for $52,000 and bought a home. She died a year and a half later.

Michael Donald is remembered in America's Black Holocaust Museum in Milwaukee in its "Strange Fruit" exhibit, which chronicles lynchings in America (Jet, Dec. 5, 2005). His story is also the introductory exhibit in the Civil Rights Memorial Center in Montgomery.