Ku Klux Klan

The Ku Klux Klan is presented as an instrument of racial terror, not merely as a symbol of it: its members selected and murdered Michael Donald after a mistrial in a case involving a Black man accused of shooting a white police officer. The killing exposes how racial violence could be mobilized against Black people and then obscured by the institutions responsible for investigating it.

Racial Terror and the Lynching of Michael Donald

In Mobile, about sixty miles south of where Walter McMillian was being threatened, Donald was walking home from a store on the evening after the mistrial. Many white people blamed the verdict on the Black people who had been allowed to serve on the jury. A group of enraged white men belonging to the Ku Klux Klan burned a cross on the courthouse lawn, then went looking for someone to victimize. They found Donald, severely beat him, and hanged him from a nearby tree. His body was discovered several hours later.

The Klan in a Longer History of Racial Terror

The lynching belonged to a broader history in which racial violence enforced white supremacy beyond any single crime or locality. The book traces that terror from the collapse of Reconstruction into the years before World War II, describing how Black Southerners faced threats from police, the Klan, and white people more generally. An older Black man’s recollection of bombings, lynchings, and other racial violence challenges the idea that domestic terrorism was new in the aftermath of September 11, 2001; for people who had grown up under racial terror, it was a longstanding feature of American life.

The account also places the Klan’s violence alongside laws and institutions that preserved racial hierarchy. After federal troops left Alabama in the 1870s, Black people lost voting rights, while racially restrictive laws restored white supremacy; prohibitions on interracial intimacy helped sustain Jim Crow and were also used to justify the forced sterilization of poor and minority women. The book further links lynching to the development of the modern death penalty: speedy legal executions could redirect the violence of lynch mobs while assuring white Southerners that Black men would still face the ultimate punishment. In this history, the Klan’s attack on Michael Donald is both a particular murder and an instance of terror operating alongside, and through, a wider racial order.

Investigation and Its Afterlife

Local police disregarded the apparent evidence that Michael Donald had been killed in a hate crime and instead speculated that he had been involved in drug dealing, a claim his mother adamantly denied. Outraged by the lack of interest, Black community members and civil rights activists pressed the United States Department of Justice to intervene. Three white men were arrested two years later, and the details of the lynching finally became public.

The murder also remained a weapon of intimidation after the arrests. More than three years later, Tom Tate invoked Donald’s lynching while threatening Walter McMillian over his association with Karen Kelly. Walter was terrified and confused: officers said they were arresting him for raping a man but questioned him about the murder of Ronda Morrison. He denied both accusations; when he would not help them build a case, they locked him up and continued their investigation. The threat connected a recent, publicly exposed act of racial terror to the immediate coercion of another Black man.

Terror and the Institutions Around It

The account distinguishes the Klan’s direct violence from the legal and political arrangements that also sustained racial domination. In Alabama in 1987, all forty elected district attorneys were white, including in a state with sixteen majority-Black counties; legislative districting had helped preserve white majorities in judicial circuits containing majority-Black counties. In criminal trials, prosecutors could use discretionary peremptory strikes to remove Black prospective jurors, a practice that persisted despite earlier constitutional rulings. These facts do not make the Klan responsible for every discriminatory act described in the book. They show instead that organized racial terror existed within a wider landscape where political representation and access to juries remained contested. The lynching of Michael Donald stands out as an act of murderous violence, while the surrounding history makes clear that racial control could also operate through institutions and procedures.