[1][2] Several Ku Klux Klan (KKK) members beat and killed Michael Donald, a 19-year-old African-American, and hung his body from a tree.

In 1981, Josephus Anderson, an African American charged with the murder of a white policeman in Birmingham, Alabama, during an armed robbery, was tried in Mobile, where the case had been moved in a change of venue.

[4][7] Anderson would ultimately have a third mistrial before being convicted of capital murder at his fourth trial, albeit the jury spared him from execution.

He died in the Holman Correctional Facility – coincidentally, the same location where Henry Hays was executed – where he was still serving his sentence, in March 2021.

[9] While Hays and Knowles were cruising through one of Mobile's mostly black neighborhoods, they spotted Michael Donald walking home after he bought a pack of cigarettes for his sister, at the nearby gas station.

The men left Donald's lifeless body hanging from a tree on Herndon Avenue across the street from Hays's house in Mobile, where it remained until the next morning.

[5][3][7] The same night, two other UKA members burned a cross on the Mobile County courthouse lawn to celebrate the murder.

[4] His brother Michael Figures, a state senator and civil rights activist, served as an attorney to Beulah Mae Donald and also encouraged the investigation.

Initially resulting in a mistrial in 1988, a second trial held on May 18, 1989, led to Cox's conviction for being an accomplice in Donald's killing.

[3] Acting at the request of Beulah Mae Donald, Morris Dees, founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, and Michael Figures brought a wrongful death suit in 1984 against the United Klans of America in federal court in the Southern District of Alabama, according to the SPLC.

[19] The civil trial brought out evidence that enabled the criminal indictment and conviction of Cox as an accomplice, and of Bennie Jack Hays for inciting the murder.

[20] In 1987, an all-white jury had decided that rather than hold Knowles, the elder and younger Hayses liable, it found the entire UKA as a group to be at fault.

The group was forced to settle the suit by selling its two-story "national headquarters" building for $51,875, the proceeds going to Donald's mother.

Mobile's first black mayor, Sam Jones, presided over a small gathering of Donald's family and local leaders at the commemoration.

Laurence Leamer wrote a book, The Lynching: The Epic Courtroom Battle That Brought Down the Klan (2016), chronicling the case.

[26] Ted Koppel created "The Last Lynching", a Discovery Channel television program about US civil rights history that aired in October 2008.

[2] The National Geographic's Inside American Terror series explored Donald's murder in a 2008 episode about the KKK.

[27] In 2021, CNN produced a four-episode miniseries, The People v. The Klan, that focused on Beulah Mae Donald's lawsuit against the UKA.