Inside the case that bankrupted the Klan elisfkc2 / Flickr / CC BY-SA 2.0 At first, Cecelia Perry thought she knew what happened to her younger brother when he failed to return from a late-night trip to a service station on March 20, 1981. Nineteen-year-old Michael Donald was thoughtful and responsible working at night and watching Perry’s oldest son during the day. He’d been with Perry at another sister’s home in Mobile, Alabama, when he stepped out around 11 p.m. to pick up cigarettes. As the hour grew later with no sign of him, “everybody assumed that he’d gone home to my mom,” Perry says in CNN’s docuseries, “The People v. The Klan.”
The Black Mother Who Kicked the KKK's Racist Ass yahoo.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from yahoo.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
According to sociologists Stewart Emory Tolnay and EM Beck, who wrote A Festival of Violence , Michael Donald was different from some lynching victims. According to them, he was not accused of committing a crime or thought to have breached racial etiquette. Instead, he was killed because the Klan members were furious that the second trial of Josephus Anderson, a Black man accused of murdering a white policeman, had been declared a mistrial when the jury could not reach a verdict. Enraged with the verdict, Klan members, Hays and Knowles, chose Donald at random, tracked him down, beat him brutally, then strangled him to death. They showed him off at a house party of Klan elder Bennie Hays’ that night before hanging his body from a tree on the residential Herndon Avenue. Donald was stopped by two White men in a vehicle asking for directions. It was a ruse, once Donald paused to help, one of the men produced a gun and forced Donald into their car. The two men then took him to a secluded location where they beat him, strangled him and cut his throat. They then took his body back to a residential area of Mobile, where they hung his body from a tree.
Inside the case that bankrupted the Klan kesq.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from kesq.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.