Original subtitles

The body of a Black man

has been found hanging from a tree in Mobile, Alabama.

Lynching is a tool to control and oppress Black people.

Racialized violence is as old as the constitution.

Klans are not running around

with white sheets over their head

but it's still happening

Today, people are horrified over Police.

[angry crowd shouting]

It's the modern-day lynching.

What are we going to do about it?

We move forward with people deciding,

I'm bold enough, and I'm gonna make it change.

Beulah Mae Donald took on

one of the most violent criminal organizations

in the United States.

This is an incredible story of courage.

[somber music]

[radio announcer] The body of a Black man

has been found hanging from a tree in Mobile, Alabama.

[serene music]

[Cecelia] Living in Mobile, was a quiet town.

It's nothing but old trees.

But after March 1981...

it was, kinda like, creepy to me to just look at the trees.

[somber music continues]

The hurt is still there,

the hurt my mom went through.

I just visualize her face,

and I go, like, I can't talk about it today.

[slide projector clicking]

My mama, Beulah Mae Donald, was a quiet woman.

She was a good-hearted person.

All the neighborhoods that we have lived in,

everybody loved her.

Mrs. Donald was a very well-liked person

because of her personality.

She'd volunteer her time working with children,

a model mother.

[slide projector clicking]

[Cecelia] Michael was my brother.

Michael was well-loved. He was quiet.

He worked at night,

and he kept my oldest son during the day time.

Michael was a well-mannered, and a polite, young man.

Michael is a true example that hard work pays off.

The housing project we lived in, everybody knew each other.

And this family cooked, we ate from them,

and if my mom cooked, they ate from us.

There was gangs and stuff back then,

but we didn't get involved in it.

My mom was always sitting on the porch,

waiting on us to arrive home from school.

If he came home and I was lying down,

he'd do, you know, little things to help.

That's the kind of boy he was.

[Cecelia] We didn't know nothing about the world

and what the world was doing out there.

We just knew that we lived in the housing project,

but we could not venture away from home.

We had to always be where she could call us.

People call it sheltered. I call it living a good life.

[soft piano music]

[ominous music]

[Cecelia] We were all gathered at my sister's house, Betty.

And we would always sit around on Friday night,

'cause she lived right round the corner from my mom.

And so my niece, Vanessa, said, "I need some cigarettes".

Michael said, "I'll walk up there and get 'em."

He said that he needed him some cigarettes.

So he would go to the service station on Davis Avenue.

He left and then he didn't come, so we thought he was at home.

[Cecelia] They got to bed later on that night

and he never came back.

Vanessa, she say, "He took my money and went home."

I say, "He probably did" She say, "I'm gonna get him."

And we start laughing. I say, "Yeah, you get him."

You know, everybody's assuming he gone home to my mom.

[ominous music]

[Cornell Brooks] As a woman of profound faith,

Beulah Mae Donald had, not a dream, but a vision.

In her vision, she saw her son in a casket.

[ominous music]

[Beulah Mae] In my vision, my body rolled

in front of my living room and lay there,

a brown-skinned man in a gray casket.

I couldn't tell who he was.

But when I woke up, I-- I was hurt.

And that's when I began to call all my children.

[phone ringing]

The next morning she called

and said she hadn't seen him all night.

[phone ringing]

And I say, "You haven't?" And she say, "No."

That Saturday morning,

a friend of ours called and said,

"Look, you guys need to come over here on Herndon."

They got a Black man, hanging from a tree over here.

We would just stall and say, "What, are you serious?"

[Policeman] You're gonna have to move.

-[Robert Gilliard] Can I speak with you a moment?

The information I have, you can tell me

whether it's true or not,

that a Black man was found in a tree.

I was advised that if anybody was talking to me,

I was supposed to talk to a supervisor.

-Yeah, all right. All right. -Thanks.

Beautiful spring morning,

temperatures high 50s, low 60s at daylight

I'm coming in Spring Hill Avenue,

I hear a couple of transmissions over the police radio.

It was actually called in

by the first reporting patrol officer as one dead.

[Chris Galanos] On the way down there,

what was going through my mind was trying to anticipate

what I was going to find.

And most importantly, what, if any,

witnesses were going to be there.

And then there was another part of me that said,

whatever you see, don't let your emotions

get in the way of what you got to do.

[Wilbur Williams] I thought I was one of those people

that could handle most anything.

As long as I have my faculties,

that picture that morning,

will be etched in my mind forever.

And then the Police Department

got a call about a wallet found in a dumpster.

Then that's when we found an ID card

identifying the young man as Michael Anthony Donald.

That morning, one of my cousins called and said,

-"They believe it's Michael." -[slide projector clicking]

"It's him"

That's all I could say was, "It's him."

[crying]

I was just numb.

I couldn't believe that this was happening to us.

And I looked outside my mom's door,

and it was people everywhere.

I mean, everywhere in the neighborhood.

They had come from far and near.

My sister, Cynthia Hamilton,

she went to identify the body, with my husband.

All he had done,

was left his mom's house that night

to walk to the service station

to buy a pack of cigarettes...

Not knowing what was waiting for him.

I can only imagine what Mrs. Donald went through.

The crowd just gathered.

People started gathering here.

Senator Michael Figures and I, we jumped in the car.

Senator Michael Figures was the de facto leader

of the Black community.

As a lawyer, Michael was there to gather facts.

We'd started looking around,

trying to talk to people over there

to see if anybody knew exactly what happened,

who was involved.

-[slide projector clicking] -[urgent music]

Someone has taken a young man,

hung him in a tree.

Who would do something this hideous in the community?

-[slide projector clicking] -[urgent music]

What's going through my mind is,

-[slide projector clicking] -[urgent music]

who the hell did this and why?

[urgent music]

[newsreader] In Mobile, Alabama, last night...

[newsreader] Mobile, Alabama...

[newsreader] 19-year-old, Michael Donald

was brutally beaten and hanged.

[newsreader] The victim was battered and lynched.

[newsreader] The lynching of teenager...

[newsreader] ... throat slit, face beaten, mangled hands...

[newsreader] The apparent lynching of a teenager

in Mobile, Alabama has echoes

of the long-forgotten murder of Emmett Till.

[slide projector clicking]

[newsreader] The brutal lynching of Emmett Till

one of the most barbaric atrocities

committed against a child in the history of mankind.

[Ollie Gordon] Emmett was more like a sibling than a cousin.

He was our guardian. He was a jokster.

He pulled all kind of pranks. He was a typical 14-year-old.

Thirty days ago I was very busy getting Emmett

to go away on a trip

that I thought would be the highlight of his 14 years.

But my baby was taken

from his uncle's home and my aunt's home.

And I found out about it 9.30, Sunday morning.

[Ollie Gordon] The only thing they did wrong

in the eyes of society is that they were born Black boys.

They were innocent.

They were going about life, trying to get their education.

They weren't committing any crimes.

They were killed because of the color of their skin.

I didn't want it to happen to nobody else's child

like it has mine.

You don't know what the agonies

until you go through it.

[Chris Galanos] I remember going to Mrs. Donald's apartment.

There was no anger expressed, no bitterness.

It was you just go out and do what you've got to do.

We do not have a suspect. we do not have a motive.

We are gathering facts.

Michael, he was at his sister's house,

watching a basketball game.

[newsreader] Michael Donald was last seen

at 11 o'clock, Friday night, here, at the home of his aunt.

At 11 p.m. he had some conversation with his sister.

He said, "I have a dollar.

I'm going to get a pack of cigarettes."

And he was headed to a service station

that was just a few blocks away.

That was the last time he was seen.

Nobody saw anything. Nobody heard anything.

We just started investigating everything we could.

The midnight shift officers that had discovered the body,

started relating all of the incidents

that had occurred throughout the night.

There was an issue with a taxi driver

that would not respond to his dispatcher.

He was last reported on Herndon Avenue.

Someone burned a small cross

at the back of the courthouse downtown

during the early part of the night.

And then a domestic squabble had actually occurred

over on Dolphin Street, which is three blocks away.

There were three male subjects involved.

Ralph Eugene Hayes and Jimmy and Johnny Edgar.

Mr. Hayes had failed to come home from work that evening.

Hayes lived at 115 Herndon Avenue.

Simply because of the proximity, we obtained permission to search

and that was when we found a gun, a knife,

a picture of a hangman's noose, hanging in a tree.

[slide projector clicking]

We brought him to Police headquarters downtown

and questioned him.

And then all of a sudden,

a character surfaced by the name of Johnny Ray Kelly.

Mr. Kelly said that on Friday night

he was five blocks west of Herndon Avenue,

on Spring Hill.

And he said, "I was standing out here,

and up walked Jimmy, Johnny and Ralph."

[Chris Galanos] Kelly claimed that he observed

blood on Ralph Hayes' clothes.

Ralph told them that he had, "Jumped a Black dude."

And Ralph has a spot of blood this big on his T-shirt.

And one of the Edgar boys is literally cleaning blood out

from under his fingernails with a pocket knife.

This was evidence that was piling up.

So four days later, we arrested and charged them

for the murder of Michael Donald.

[typewriter keys clacking]

We have them in jail,

we're starting to pick up pieces here and there.

We determined that there had been a burglary

that had occurred at the end of Herndon Avenue.

When we finally figured out who the burglar was,

he admits that he saw two guys

fighting with a Black guy at the tree.

They weren't fighting.

They were trying to get his body lifted up

to get him hung into the tree.

Well, you can't put a burglar on the witness stand

and expect the jury to believe him.

The biggest issue that came up during the investigation

was that information that was coming in

was coming from every direction.

Mobile had a fairly significant late night street population.

Talking about drug addicts.

[Cecelia] The detectives was trying to see

was there something tied in with drugs.

And they want to know

was he involved in anything like that.

And I go, like, no.

[negating] He wasn't.

[confirming]

There's this assumption, literally, of Black criminality

when it comes to Black victims.

What happens is a postmortem character assassination.

Instead of investigating the perpetrators of a crime,

we criminalize the victim.

And this is a pattern

that we saw with Trayvon Martin,

what we saw with George Floyd,

and what we saw with Sandra Bland.

We saw this with Mamie Till, who had to defend

her 14-year-old child's reputation.

And Eric Garner's mother, having to defend her son

who simply did not want to be harassed.

They want to assassinate our child twice.

They want to kill them on the street

and then they want to assassinate their character.

So we have to get out there and say, "No, you're wrong."

Let me tell you who my child was."

Michael Donald was an innocent, good Samaritan, not a thug,

So we obtained permission to search Michael's room,

and basically found nothing in his bedroom.

We knew the kind of young man he was.

We knew the kind of family he had.

Some people were trying to say

that we don't think it's an issue

that has anything to do with violation of civil rights.

We don't think it has anything to do with race.

We think it was something with a drug deal

that went bad or something.

We knew that wasn't the case.

You couldn't convince anybody in the Black community.

[somber music]

So we had to just live and work through it

because we knew that he was just an innocent person.

He was innocent in this.

They tried to deviate from the truth,

to take the attention from what really happened.

[solemn music]

[typewriter keys clacking]

[muted Church chatter]

The funeral people came over

and the lady held my mom's hand and she said,

"I don't think you wanna open him up."

Just the idea they took him and hung him,

just hung him up.

They beat him unmercifully.

I didn't even know what he looked like as my child.

The undertaker didn't want me to see

where they'd made a footprint on his face with their boots.

The casket was open,

the sight was horrible.

But Mrs. Donald,

as did the mother of Emmett Till,

wanted the world to see what they had done to her son.

[newsreader] At this store, the murdered Negro child,

Emmett Till, is alleged to have whistled

at Roy Bryant's wife.

He went into the store to buy some candy.

Allegedly, they said that he got fresh

or whistled to Carolyn Bryant at the time

As they saw it, disrespecting a white woman.

Emmett stuttered.

So his mom taught him to whistle to break the stutter

so he could get his words out.

She often wondered

if that had something to do with his untimely death.

[newsreader] The state alleges Emmett Till was abducted

and murdered by Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam.

Sunday morning about 2.30, someone called at the door

and he said, "I watched it.

I watched the boy that done all that talk."

Not only did they beat him, they didn't have to,

'cause they had shot him in the head.

And when the body came back it was in four wooden boxes.

The coffin could not be open.

His mother, being the woman that she was,

she told Mr. Wendell, "You all won't open it,

give me a crowbar. I'm going to open this casket."

The reaction of the adults in the family,

the pain, the hurt, the screaming, the yelling.

I was seven. I'm 72 now, and I still cry.

[somber music]

When you think about Emmett Till's mother,

deciding to have the open casket

so that the world might see what was done to her child.

That also meant she had to see what the world did to her child.

[Ollie Gordon] I think that Mrs. Donald

had some reflections back, remembering the courage

and the spirit of Emmett's mother

because she wants the world to know,

-this is still occurring -[sobbing]

30 years later. [sobbing]

Amen.

[attendee] Michael, I'm gonna see you again. I know I will.

At the time of the funeral

nobody really could explain why it happened.

All kinds of things was running through our mind.

We didn't rule out the police hunt

because of what has already happened.

[ominous music]

I knew Wilbur and I knew

what the reputation was on some things

that he did earlier in his career.

There was an incident

that had occurred some years before here in Mobile.

Police officer stopped us and engaged us,

wanted to know what are we doing in the neighborhood.

We told him we having car trouble,

and one thing led to another.

I was there when the incident started

A robbery suspect was apprehended

named Glenn Diamond.

I was the revolutionary in the neighborhood.

If my name come up, everybody wanna,

you know, get this guy here.

'Cause I, you know, I always protested

police mistreating Black people

Things got heated.

They bust me in the head. They beat me up pretty good.

My head was bloody, my shirt was bloody.

He was handcuffed and at that time

I got a call to go to another situation

at the Greyhound bus station.

When backup got there,

they was hurling racial insults at my four-month-old baby,

saying, "Feed the nigger babies to the alligators."

In a matter of minutes, somebody came back with a rope.

Now, apparently, they had been riding round

with a noose in the car.

So when the guy came,

the noose was already in the rope,

not like they had to tie it up or nothing,

They just threw it in the tree when he brought it back.

And they put it around my neck

and Officer Patrick began to pull on the rope

and pull it to the extent where he choked me enough

to pull me up onto my toes.

[newsreader] Local officials called it a sick prank.

The guy who put the rope around my neck,

he confessed on the witness stand.

Yeah, I did it, Your Honor,

but I wasn't just trying to hang him,

I was just trying to scare him.

In the middle of the Glenn Diamond case,

Robert Shelton, who at the time,

was the most powerful member of the Klan in America,

comes down to Mobile to meet with the Police commissioner

for the sole purpose of showing the police

that the Klan has their back.

Did Robert Shelton, Klan leader,

come down and get a photo with somebody from the station

after the mock lynching that was in the paper?

-No. -Or was that a rumor?

That's strictly rumor. That never happened.

[haunting music]

There were five of us that were indicted.

Well, I was suspended on April 15th, 1976

and I was off work 'til November 29th.

The charges against me were thrown out

because I wasn't even there.

Wilbur Williams wasn't one of the main culprits that night.

But overall, when it came down to the relationship

with the police department and Black community,

it was always hostile.

Ida B. Wells once said,

"The ones who write the reports commit the murders."

Even when other officers know that something

someone is doing within the department is wrong

there is such a wall of silence.

The blue wall is what we call it.

Michael was the lawyer for Glenn Diamond

and later, Michael Donald.

And he just knew that that was the lay of the land.

That there was racism on every level

and it needed to be fought.

We are calling on Mobile's Black community

to be as cool as possible in response to this murder.

But at the same time, we are urging them

to exercise due caution and to take all necessary steps

to secure their person, families and property.

Ain't gonna tolerate this, how we felt,

the cops and the Klan working hand-in-hand.

Wilbur doing a vigorous investigation,

looking for the actual facts of what took place?

He wasn't trusted to do that.

That morning

Senator Michael Figures showed up there

I knew what his attitude was going to be.

This is just not right.

You were involved in the Glenn Diamond hanging

and now, here you are, main investigator of this case.

And maybe they, in their minds,

thought I was a Klan sympathizer.

The look of it was absolutely wrong.

There was no collusion there on our part.

You cannot imagine the immense amount of pressure

that was on the police department.

And I think that fact

caused the investigation to go like it did.

There came a point in time

when the likely suspects were identified.

And then a person who lived in the neighborhood

came forward and changed the entire case.

Well, in essence, Johnny Ray Kelly was lying.

We had been duped.

[dramatic music]

Johnny Ray Kelly was lying.

Somehow he got enough information

that he could concoct this story about seeing

the Edgar brothers and Ralph on Spring Hill Avenue.

We come to find out he was facing burglary charges.

He was looking for help

but I suspect he was manipulated by somebody else.

We originally arrested the wrong people

and that's on me.

That was my mistake.

I went into a court room

and moved to have the charges dismissed against them.

I wanted to make sure that the Black community

understood that we were doing all that we could.

That I cared deeply about.

But I wasn't... communicating

with, you know, civic leaders,

either in the Black or the white communities.

And there were two separate communities.

It was really depressing.

It was really. It was really. You couldn't eat. You couldn't--

You couldn't think of nothing else

'cause our life had just come to a stand still.

[typewriter keys clacking]

The Mobile Police Department, they sat on it.

They would just call and say,

"We haven't forgotten you, Miss Donald.

We still working on the case."

Oh, okay. Do something about it.

Michael Figures was Mrs. Donald's attorney.

He went there to express his condolences

and to offer his help in any way that he could,

and to let her know

that he would not rest until the case was resolved

and justice was brought for her son.

My father was one of the first

African-American students to attend

the University of Alabama's Law School,

becoming the first Black lawyer

to be educated in the State of Alabama.

We would go to Michael Figure's office

and talk to him

"Well, what you want to do?"

That's what he was telling my mom.

What do you want to do?

This is something that's understood

by all Black Americans,

no matter where you lived or how you lived.

You understood that law enforcement

had never been created, honestly, to protect you.

Was created in order to protect white America,

often from you.

[dramatic music]

[newsreader] Here stands the Tallahatchi Courthouse

in Sumner, Mississippi.

It was a mockery that they made out of it

because someone Black

was bringing someone White to trial.

[newsreader] This small, sleepy cotton community

has been overrun with excitement

as the trial begins.

It was more like going to a baseball game or something

They had their beer and their popcorn,

and they had their kids.

It was a circus is what it was.

[newsreader] The all White, male jury

deliberated for merely an hour before announcing the verdict.

Not guilty.

Well, the whole trial was just a farce.

The verdict was the one

that I had expected to be given.

-Did you expect this verdict? -Well, I was hoping for it.

[crowd clapping]

So at that point, she went into combat.

She went into battle to get some kind of justice

for what they had done to her only child.

Just anything, just any excuse to acquit these two men.

And the acquittal would mean a go-ahead signal,

lynching is now back in order.

She was very stern, and she was very strong,

and she was very dedicated, and she was not scared.

I believe that the whole United States

is mourning with me.

For him to have died a hero would mean more to me

than for him just to have died. [crowd applauding]

[announcer] ... our objectives here is to see to it

that that boy, whose picture you see there,

does not die an inconspicuous death

and that his face will be remembered,

and something will be done about it.

[applauding]

We think of Mamie Till,

the courageous Black mother of Emmett Till.

and the courage of Beulah Mae Donald,

who was unrelenting in trying to get justice for her son.

It's part of a tradition of Black women,

and Black mothers in particular,

who have fought to get

their children's death vindicated

but who have often been ignored.

We want them to go to jail, just like we would go to jail

-for 25 to life. -[crowd cheering]

My son said he couldn't breathe 11 times.

Eleven times he said he couldn't breathe.

And they chose not to indict. Where is the justice?

These women,

and their contributions to civil rights history,

should never be forgotten.

In the same way

that Mamie Till fought to bring about justice

for the death of her son,

Beulah Mae Donald

and her attorney, Michael Figures,

enlist the voice

of the Reverend Jesse Jackson,

future presidential candidate,

to come to Mobile and tell their story,

and put it on a national stage.

Miss Beulah had no fear.

She wanted to see those who killed her son

come to justice.

I was impressed with her resilience

to fight back.

Rev was one of the most feared names

around here, in this area in Alabama.

We said the preacher was coming to town,

the White folk got upset, let me tell you.

So when Jesse came here,

it brought national attention to our issue.

Michael called me,

we went to a major demonstration to put visibility on it.

I got there and people were just wanting to do something.

[crowd chattering

Eventually there was a march

that was led by my husband, Michael,

and Reverend Jesse Jackson came down.

So it was a big deal

and it wasn't just in the city of Mobile

but it went around this nation.

[crowd chanting]

Mobile was just moving too slow.

That's why we kept marching and protesting

Letting them know we ain't gonna take this lying down.

[crowd chanting]

Y'all got to move, and you got to move fast.

You got to move and you got to move fast.

That was our thrust to them.

You got to move, and you got to move fast.

A lot of the community

started coming to my momma's house

to say we just need to do something.

Some of the guys say well they're not doing no.

We just need to go and get somebody and kill them too.

So they were getting really angry.

They were really getting frustrated.

[crowd cheering]

Everybody was uneasy.

Everybody was at the point

where we got to do something about this.

Why are we living here with these type things

taking place right in the middle of our community?

The bottom line was

the community was really about to explode.

We weren't getting what we considered to be all the facts

from the local media during that time.

The stories that would appear in the Mobile Press Register,

which was the daily, White newspaper in the city of Mobile

at the time, would blast black officials.

We thought it was necessary for the other side to be told.

Michael and a group of his friends,

started a new weekly newspaper called The New Times.

One of the reasons that newspaper was started

was so that it could tell the story

from the Black person's perspective.

The New Times is literally doing the work

that Jet Magazine did back in 1955.

Jet Magazine was like Black Twitter of the moment.

Emmett Till's picture catalyzed the modern civil rights movement

because these lynching images

have the effect of literally traumatizing people.

In the same way, The New Times took on the responsibility

of reporting, investigating and pressing the case

on behalf of Michael Donald.

This precipitated the anger, the outrage,

the fear of the Klan.

The Klan actually called The New Times office

and requested a subscription to the paper.

That was one of their moves

in terms of keeping a constant threat

to say, you know, we're gonna come and get you.

And Michael did not back down.

On the morning of March 21st, 1981,

Michael went down to see for himself what was going on.

And he took pictures

of everybody at the scene that he could.

There were a group of people,

right across the street from where it took place.

And these guys were just sitting there,

smoking cigarettes,

talking like it was just a normal day.

That's one of the things

that caused Michael to take so many pictures of them.

He was wondering how they could just stand there nonchalant.

And we had no idea who they were.

It turned out, he took pictures of the Klan.

[dramatic music]

[somber music]

[slide projector clicking]

The fact that Klansmen lived across the street

from where this happened

came to light very early on in the investigation.

It was something that the police officers

found to be more a coincidence

than any indication of who did the actual crime.

We were over at the body,

making some notes about the condition and whatever

when I look and I see Bennie Jack Hays,

who is the person that owned the property

and was the local--

And I don't know what the rank is--

what his position was, some cyclops or grand titan,

or some Klan related rank, did he have.

He was very volatile, very angry,

very strange behavior.

[newsreader] Benny Hayes was a paradox.

Grandfatherly, with a cane,

but capable of sudden outbursts of anger.

Take it off me, son of a bitch. Get it off.

[Frank Cox] Bennie Jack was a terrible man.

And I don't like speaking ill of the dead

but he was pure evil.

And he was coming up Herden Avenue,

fussing and raising cane,

talking about I own all of these houses,

what the blank you doing

keeping me from coming to my properties?

He was just loud-mouthing.

I think there were certain parts of Mobile

that feared him all the way to his death.

They knew that it was the Klan.

We knew that that element was in the community.

and it was a dangerous situation as far as we were concerned.

[haunting music]

Nobody, at that point, had any answers.

We thought that an independent investigative body

needed to come in and look at it.

We knew that the narrative put forth

was nothing near the truth.

Eventually, it really got close to a boiling point.

It's not right for them to go around

hanging Black folks, you know,

because we don't go out there and hang no White people.

So, they did assign the civil rights division

of the Justice Department, to look into the matter

and actually put together

an investigation that really brought the truth out.

[stirring music]

Ultimately, my father and my uncle

began to push out the message

that this was racially motivated and an act of the Klan.

[newsreader] Thomas Figures is the first Black man

to be appointed and serve

as assistant Mobile County District Attorney.

What you had here were two African-American men

in a position that no African-American men

had previously been in.

At the time of such a crime

to be able to have an influential impact.

Thomas was certainly that bull in a china shop

when it came to this case.

...administration of the Criminal Justice System

for the State of Alabama.

He would not stop. He went above and beyond,

all the way up to the Civil Rights Division in DC,

to request that the case be reopened.

Running down the leads that Mobile police refused to do.

That ultimately led to all the dominos starting to fall

as to who was responsible for this case.

Had it not been for Thomas Figures

pushing on this,

this thing wouldn't have gone any further.

With the weight of the Federal Government

and the State Government behind us,

we should be able to send everybody,

who had some responsibility in this action.

before the mob justice

and let them reap their just reward.

I think the Mobile Police Department

just didn't want to believe that a town like Mobile

would still have Klan in it.

But they did.

[angry crowd chatter]

Let there be no doubt that the Klan is behind this.

But you gotta prove it first.

[closing theme music]