One Chic Element

Two Klansmen drove around Mobile, Alabama looking for any Black person to kill. They found a 19-year-old walking to the store for cigarettes. His mother spent the next six years dismantling the Ku Klux Klan in a courtroom. Michael Donald. March 1981. They beat him, killed him, and hung his body from a tree on a residential street, across from a Klansman's house, so the city would see it in the morning. Police initially suggested it was a drug deal. It was not. It was a Klan retaliation for a jury's failure to convict a Black defendant in another case — a life taken at random to send a message. Beulah Mae Donald refused every version of the story except the true one. She pushed until the FBI reopened it. One killer confessed. The other was executed in 1997 — the first white man executed in Alabama for killing a Black person since 1913. Then she did the thing nobody expected. She sued the United Klans of America itself. In 1987 an all-white Alabama jury awarded her seven million dollars. The Klan had no money — so it handed over its national headquarters building. The organization was finished. A mother buried her son and bankrupted the Ku Klux Klan.