The Atlanta Constitution from Atlanta, Georgia • 4

The Atlanta Journal The Atlanta Constitution Alabama case showed how father's sins were visited on son THE SOUTH old Donald. But the judge overruled the jury and imposed the death penal-ty, in part because of the lynching-style hnitfllitv nf the 2 culpable in Donald's murder and awarded his mother $7 million in damages. The Klan in 1987 turned over to her its only significant asset: the deed to its national headquarters in Tuscaloosa worth about $55,000. On the strength of the evidence presented at the civil trial, the Mobile district attorney was able to indict the father, Bennie Hays, and his son-in-law Frank Cox for murder in the Donald slaying. "Hays' first time in court ended in a mistrial, and before he could be retried he died from a heart attack.

Cox was convicted and sentenced to 99 years," said Cohen. Beulah Mae Donald got the money from the sale of the Klan property and moved out of public housing, though that was far short of $7 million. What was important, and what made a difference in the fabric of racist networks, is that winning in court with the "theory of agency" made traditional neo-Nazi groups less effective, Cohen said. "It was a very, very important legal precedent," he said. agreed to let Morris Dees, director of the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, file a civil suit arguing that Unit 900 and United Klans of America were responsible for her son's death.

Dees reasoned that the killers were carrying out a concerted, organization-wide policy set by Robert Shelton, the Klan's Imperial Wizard. Under the "theory of agency," Shelton's Klan would be as liable for the murder as a corporation is for the actions of its employees. The civil jury agreed that the Klan, as an organization, was Donald slaying and because the victim's wallet was stolen in the process, making it a homicide during the commission of another felony. Three years after the murder, when Hays and Knowles were in custody, Beulah Mae Donald II Willi! OUR BIGGEST HOME SALE OF THE YEAR! OFF 'White's execution for killing black didn't end inherited racism. By Gita M.

Smith fOR THE JOURNAL-CONSTITUTION TTl 'rm'n8ham When Ku vKlux Klansman Henry LmJ Francis Hays died in Alabama's electric chair Friday, the 1981 killing of black teenager 'Michael Donald had a sort of closure. But for Southern Poverty Law 'Center staff members who won a landmark lawsuit against United Klans of America on behalf of the victim's mother, the image of' Donald's body hanging from a camphor tree in downtown Mobile is still a vivid reminder that bigotry doesn't end with an 'execution. surviving Donald family 'members wanted to see the sentence carried out, but we have 'mixed feelings about the execution," said SPLC attorney Richard Cohen. "The Southern Poverty Center has worked against the death penalty, and most of us here are opposed to it under any Instead, Cohen believes the chain of hatred passed down from parents to children must be broken if violent racism is to end. "We saw it at Hays' trial and many other times in other work we do, how the sins of the fathers' are visited on the children," Cohen said.

Consider the circumstances surrounding the night of March Hays, then 26, and 17-year-old accomplice James "Tiger" Knowles had set out specifically to kill a black man. It was part of their Klan Unit 900's "revenge" for a jury's failure to reach a verdict earlier that day in the case of a black man accused of killing a white police officer. They found Donald walking alone that night, ordered him into their car at gunpoint, drove to neighboring Baldwin County and struck him with a tree limb more than 100 times. When he was no longer moving, they looped a rope around his neck and, for good measure, cut his throat. According to Knowles' confession to the FBI and his trial testimony, the two Klansmen then drove back to Mobile County to the home of Bennie Hays, father of Henry and second-highest Klan official in Alabama, to show off the trophy to unit members.

They tied 13 knots in the rope around Donald's neck, looped the rope over a branch of a camphor tree on Herndon Avenue across the street from the Hays home, and let the body swing. "There is no question that Henry Hays was trying to impress his father and would not otherwise have done the crime," Cohen said. "At trial and in his own defense, he could have said, "You should spare my life because the person who should be on trial is my father. He is as responsible for murdering Donald as I am, take pity on But he always denied the crime, so of course he couldn't put on that evidence at trial." Cohen, as well as many others, see the parallel between the HaysDonald case and John Grisham's best-selling novel, "The Chamber," in which white supremacist Sam Cayhall grows up to be a killer in order to gain approval from his family of Klansmen. In the novel, as in life, an execution takes place.

But in real-life Alabama, such executions are extremely rare. Hays, 42 at his death, was among that rarest breed of Alabama killers: a white sentenced to die for murdering a black. In fact, Hays' execution was the first in the white-on-black murder category in Alabama since 1913, when two whites were hanged in Birmingham for killing a black cockfighting trainer. Currently, Alabama's death row houses 153 inmates. Only three are whites convicted of killing blacks.

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