Beulah Mae Donald
In 1981, Beulah Mae Donald's nineteen-year-old son Michael was randomly selected by Klan members in Mobile, Alabama, beaten, strangled, and hung from a tree. She was the one who found his body. Law enforcement tried to frame it as a drug deal. She pushed until they got it right — a death sentence for one Klan member, the first white man executed for a crime against a Black person in Alabama since Reconstruction. Then she sued the organization itself. The jury returned a $7 million verdict. It bankrupted the United Klans of America. She received the deed to their national headquarters building.
Beulah Mae Donald was a seamstress in Mobile, Alabama. On March 21, 1981, her nineteen-year-old son Michael was abducted by two members of the United Klans of America, beaten with a tree limb, strangled with a rope, and hung from a camphor tree in a residential neighborhood. He had been chosen at random. The Klan members were angry about the outcome of a trial involving a Black man accused of killing a white police officer. Michael Donald had nothing to do with it.
Beulah Mae Donald found out her son was dead when a neighbor called her to the window. She saw his body hanging in the street.
Local police initially tried to classify the murder as a drug deal gone wrong. Donald did not accept that. Neither did civil rights attorneys and FBI investigators she pushed to keep looking. In 1983, two Klan members were arrested. Tiger Knowles pleaded guilty and agreed to testify against Henry Hays, the son of a local Klan leader. Hays was convicted of murder and sentenced to death.
But Beulah Mae Donald was not finished. With the help of attorney Morris Dees and the Southern Poverty Law Center, she filed a civil lawsuit — not against the individual men, but against the United Klans of America as an organization. The legal theory was that the Klan bore institutional responsibility for creating the environment that led to her son's murder.
In February 1987, an all-white jury in Mobile agreed. They returned a $7 million verdict against the United Klans of America. The organization could not pay it. They signed over the deed to their national headquarters building — a building in Tuscaloosa — to satisfy the judgment. The United Klans of America effectively ceased to exist as a functioning organization.
Henry Hays was executed on June 6, 1997. He was the first white man executed for a crime against a Black person in Alabama since Reconstruction. Beulah Mae Donald did not live to see it. She died in 1988, nine years before the execution — but after the civil verdict, after the bankruptcy, and after the deed to the Klan's building was in her hands.
I want him to know before he dies that I do not hate him. I forgive him. I do this not for him, but for myself. Hate is too heavy a burden to bear.Beulah Mae Donald, on Henry Hays before his execution
She lost her son to random racial terror and then spent years navigating a legal system that had initially tried to minimize what happened. She died before seeing the full arc of justice completed — before Henry Hays was executed. What she did see was a $7 million verdict that bankrupted an organization. She converted grief into the most effective legal weapon deployed against the Klan in the 20th century.
Beulah Mae Donald's lawsuit established that hate groups could be held organizationally liable for violence carried out by their members. The Southern Poverty Law Center has used this legal strategy repeatedly since — bankrupting white supremacist organizations across the country by going after the institution, not just the individual. Every subsequent case that dismantled a hate group through civil litigation traces back to what she started.
She also refused to let the system call her son's death something it was not. She insisted on the truth at every stage. That insistence changed what justice looked like for everyone who came after.