A ghastly 40th anniversary in Mobile, Alabama
Last edited Sun Mar 21, 2021, 06:19 PM - Edit history (1)
Michael Donald was killed and hanged on March 21, 1981.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-a-detective-who-was-blamed-for-one-lynching-solved-another?ref=home
clip:
Forty years seems like a long time but if Michael Donald hadn’t been lynched on March 21, 1981, he wouldn’t even be 60 years old yet. If the teenager’s body had not been hung in the predawn darkness on a residential street in Mobile, Alabama, he might be holding grandkids or serving as a church deacon now.
His case became a crucible for a town in denial about its capacity for brutality, for shortcomings in law enforcement and governance, and for a detective who shed undeserved tarnish for an earlier near-lynching through his pivotal role in finally solving Donald’s murder.
Start with the undeserved tarnish. As tensions percolated in Mobile in the 1970s, the Ku Klux Klan was “sufficiently accepted that the Mobile Register listed its rallies the way the paper did high school football games,” as Laurence Leamer wrote in The Lynching: The Epic Courtroom Battle That Brought Down the Klan.
More at the link. It emerges from the paywall tomorrow.
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