Last Lynching in America: The Case That Bankrupted the Klan

The last lynching in America is generally identified as the 1981 murder of Michael Donald, a 19-year-old Black man in Mobile, Alabama, who was abducted, beaten, strangled, and had his throat cut by two members of the Ku Klux Klan before his body was hung from a tree on Herndon Avenue. The case is singled out because it matched the historical pattern of racial terror killings and because of what followed: criminal convictions of three Klansmen, the 1997 execution of the ringleader, and a $7 million civil verdict that bankrupted the United Klans of America.

What Happened on March 20–21, 1981

Michael Donald was the youngest child of Beulah Mae Donald. He worked in the mailroom of the Mobile Press-Register and was studying to become a brick mason. On the night of March 20, 1981, he walked to a nearby store to buy cigarettes. Two Klansmen, Henry Hays and James “Tiger” Knowles, stopped him, used a ruse about needing directions, and forced him into their car at gunpoint. They drove him to a secluded area, beat and strangled him, and cut his throat. His body was found the next morning hanging from a tree in a Mobile residential neighborhood.¹

The killing was retaliation. A trial had just ended in a mistrial for Josephus Anderson, a Black man accused of killing a white police officer. Bennie Jack Hays, Henry Hays’s father and the second-highest-ranking Klansman in Alabama, was reported to have said that if a Black man could get away with killing a white man, the Klan should be able to get away with killing a Black man.² Knowles later testified that he and Hays had gone out “hunting” for a Black person to attack, intending to send a message that the Klan would not allow a Black person to kill a white officer “and get away with it.”¹

Who Was Prosecuted

The initial investigation went badly. Three men were arrested in March 1981 but released that June after a grand jury determined the charges rested on perjured testimony. Federal investigators eventually broke the case.¹

James “Tiger” Knowles pleaded guilty to a federal charge of violating Michael Donald’s civil rights and agreed to testify against Henry Hays. He received a life sentence in the federal prison system. In December 1983, a jury found Hays guilty of capital murder and recommended life without parole. The following February, an Alabama judge overruled that recommendation and sentenced Hays to death. A third man, Benjamin Franklin Cox Jr., was convicted as an accomplice.¹²

Hays maintained his innocence for 16 years, then gave a 40-minute confession to a minister, the Rev. Bob Smith, describing how Donald had been abducted, beaten, and strangled.³⁴⁵

The Lawsuit That Bankrupted the United Klans of America

In June 1984, Beulah Mae Donald’s attorneys, Alabama state senator Michael Figures and Morris Dees of the Southern Poverty Law Center, filed a civil suit against the United Klans of America on her behalf. The complaint sought more than $10 million in damages and alleged violations of the Civil Rights Act along with assault and battery.¹⁶

On February 12, 1987, an all-white jury awarded Beulah Mae Donald $7 million. The judgment effectively bankrupted the UKA, at the time one of the largest and most violent Klan factions in the country. To help satisfy the verdict, the group turned over its national headquarters building in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Donald sold the property and used the proceeds to buy her first home.¹²

The UKA had been tied to some of the most notorious acts of racial violence in American history, including the 1963 Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing and the murder of civil rights activist Viola Liuzzo. Donald v. United Klans of America established that hate groups could be held civilly liable and financially destroyed for the violent acts of their members. The SPLC reused the strategy in later years, winning a $12.5 million judgment in 1990 against Tom Metzger and White Aryan Resistance for the murder of an Ethiopian student in Portland, Oregon, and a $6.3 million verdict against the Aryan Nations in 2000 that forced the group to give up its Idaho compound.⁷

Why This Case Is Called the Last Lynching

The Donald case is treated as the last documented lynching in the United States because it so closely followed the historical pattern: a Black person targeted, seized, and killed by white supremacists as an act of racial terror, with the body displayed publicly as a message to the Black community. It happened decades after the era most commonly associated with lynching, which historians and organizations like the Equal Justice Initiative place between 1877 and 1950.²

What set the case apart from earlier lynchings was the response. In most of American history, lynching perpetrators faced no consequences at all; roughly 99 percent were never convicted.⁸ Donald’s killers were prosecuted, one was executed, and the organization behind the attack was sued into insolvency.

Cases Some Argue Extend the Timeline

Not everyone accepts 1981 as the endpoint. Civil rights attorney Jill Collen Jefferson, founder of the organization Julian, has argued that lynchings in America never stopped: “The evil bastards just stopped taking photographs and passing them around like baseball cards.” Jefferson has documented at least eight cases since 2000 in Mississippi alone in which Black men and teenagers were found hanging and their deaths were quickly ruled suicides by local authorities, over the objections of families who believe their loved ones were murdered. Those cases include Raynard Johnson, a 17-year-old found hanging in Kokomo in 2000; Nick Naylor, a 23-year-old found with a dog chain around his neck in Porterville in 2003; Otis Byrd, a 54-year-old found hanging from a tree in Port Gibson in 2015; and Deondrey Montreal Hopkins, a 35-year-old found hanging in Columbus in 2019.⁹

At least one modern killing has been explicitly linked to lynching by a federal judge. In 2011, James Craig Anderson, a 49-year-old Black man, was beaten by a group of white teenagers in a Jackson, Mississippi, parking lot and then fatally struck by a pickup truck driven by Deryl Paul Dedmon. U.S. District Judge Carlton Reeves, at sentencing, called the attack a “2011 version” of the racial terror killings that defined Mississippi’s history and said it “resurrect[ed] the nightmarish specter of lynchings and lynch mobs.” Dedmon received 50 years in federal prison.¹⁰⁹

The NAACP has adopted a broader definition of lynching that covers any “extrajudicial racial terror killing and mutilation committed to uphold racial segregation and a false premise of racial hierarchy.” Under that framework, the organization has classified the 1998 dragging murder of James Byrd Jr. in Jasper, Texas, the 2020 shooting of Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia, and the 2020 killing of George Floyd as modern-day lynchings.¹¹

Two of those cases produced significant federal convictions. Byrd, 49, was chained to the back of a pickup truck by three white men and dragged to his death on June 7, 1998; John William King and Lawrence Brewer were sentenced to death and later executed, and Shawn Berry is serving a life sentence.¹²¹³¹⁴

The Emmett Till Antilynching Act

For most of American history there was no federal law specifically criminalizing lynching. Starting in 1900, nearly 200 anti-lynching bills were introduced in Congress. The House passed measures as early as the 1920s, but they were repeatedly killed by Senate filibusters.¹⁵

On March 29, 2022, President Joe Biden signed the Emmett Till Antilynching Act into law. Named for the 14-year-old lynched in Mississippi in 1955, the act classifies lynching as a federal hate crime and provides for penalties up to life in prison when the victim dies. The House passed it 422 to 3, and the Senate passed it unanimously. EJI director Bryan Stevenson called the legislation “an overdue correction to tragic failures of the past” and described its arrival in 2022 as both “a triumph and a tragedy.”¹⁶

1
CNN. Michael Donald Case Timeline
2
AL.com. Last Lynching in America
3
Los Angeles Times. Ex-Klansman Executed in Racial Slaying
4
Washington Post. Ex-Klansman Executed in Racial Slaying
5
New York Times. Klan Member Put to Death in Race Death
6
Tort Museum. Donald v. United Klans of America
7
Southern Poverty Law Center. Our History
8
PBS NewsHour. Biden Signs Law Making Lynching a Federal Hate Crime
9
Washington Post. Modern Day Mississippi Lynchings
10
U.S. Department of Justice. Restitution Ordered in Jackson, Mississippi Hate Crime Case
11
NAACP. History of Lynching in America
12
Texas Tribune. Texas Execution John William King James Byrd
13
U.S. Department of Justice. Federal Judge Sentences Three Men Convicted of Racially Motivated Hate Crimes
14
CBS News. Ahmaud Arbery Killers Appeals Court Upholds Hate Crime Convictions
15
GovInfo. Emmett Till Antilynching Act Committee Report
16
Equal Justice Initiative. Antilynching Act Signed Into Law