Tonight The Discovery Channel aired a one-hour film by Ted Koppel, “The Last Lynching,” which focused upon the murder of Michael Donald in Mobile, AL in 1981. The best web reference is here. Two young white men in the Ku Klux Klan (Knowles and Davis) kidnapped Donald, in the wrong place at the wrong time, took him out into the pine barrens and killed him, and brought him back and hung him on Herndon Ave, which would be renamed after Donald. In 1987, the boy’s mother would bring a wrongful death civil lawsuit against the Klan and win, although she would collect little of the judgment, and would pass away herself soon (she did get the hall).
The film briefly traces the history of lynchings from the late nineteenth century through the early 20th Century (including the Rosewood incident). It mentions an incident in 1915 where all the relatives of a family were killed when an African American man accidentally shot a white sheriff. The film then summarizes the civil rights movement, particularly the Freedom Busses from the North to Mississippi. White civil rights activists were arrested and kept in prison, actually the death row in Parchman Farn, for two months or more. The film shows many photos of segregate busses, water fountains and restaurants and many scenes of fires and hosings. That is how it was until well into the 1960s.
Another film project that some visitors will want to look at is a documentary film in progress, American Lynching.
Picture: The Amistad, slave ship from the 19th Century, in dock at the National Harbor, Potomac River, Prince Georges County, MD.
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