The Lynching

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The bestselling author of The Kennedy Women presents a gripping true story of a racially motivated murder in 1981 and the trials that dismantled a notorious American organization—the Ku Klux Klan. In March 1981, Henry Hays and James Knowles, members of Klavern 900 of the United Klans of America, sought revenge after a predominantly black jury failed to reach a verdict in a case involving a black defendant. They abducted nineteen-year-old Michael Donald, brutally murdered him, and left his body hanging from a tree in a racially mixed neighborhood. Hays was arrested, charged, and sentenced to death—marking the first time in over fifty years that Alabama imposed such a sentence on a white man for killing a black man. Morris Dees, a renowned civil rights lawyer and cofounder of the Southern Poverty Law Center, filed a civil suit on behalf of Michael's mother against the local Klan unit and the UKA, leading to a trial that exposed the Klan's conspiracy and ultimately dealt a severe blow to its operations. Through extensive interviews and archival research, the narrative details two pivotal trials, revealing the KKK's motives and the enduring impact of its ideology on race relations in America. The book also includes sixteen pages of black-and-white photographs.