Michael Donald, lynched in 1981.
“They showed him off at a party at the house of Klan Elder Bennie Hays’ house that night before hanging his body from a tree” Erin Blakemore, History Stories
Under This Sky is a series of photographs taken at lynching sites in the Southern United States. It is a response to my personal experience of seeing Klan members in robes, on the street, at flea markets and in small towns when I first moved to Alabama. It is also a response to my father who talked painfully about a lynching that occurred near his hometown when he was a child. The photographs in Under this Sky are taken standing at the spot the victim would have been in, looking up, placing the viewer in the hollow space that the victim held, completely alone when he or she was alive, the last moments, the last view.
When I moved to Birmingham, I saw the Klan in their hoods and white robes many times. Once at the Fairgrounds I saw a lone man set up at a table selling Klan paraphernalia. It took me many passes to get up the nerve to walk up to the table and when I did, I bought a shiny brass key chain with three K’s cut out of it. In Collinsville, I saw a Klansman carrying a rifle, robed , walking around at the Collinsville Trade Day. Later, as I was driving to the beach with my family, and pulling into the town of Opp, I saw Klansmen in robes on either side of the road stopping cars ahead of us collecting money as a donation to their fund. When our car was stopped, one leaned into the window of our car, another standing by him, they both had coffee cans wrapped in white-paper and in a friendly manner asked us to give to the KKK which was hand written on the wrapper of the can.
But I saw the Klan face to face when I parked on Highway 31 next to a field before a cross burning rally.. A man in full robe, loaded rifle in hand leaned into the window of my car and told me where to park. I had seen the sign on my way to a conference in Atlanta and it caused me to return early to photograph in Gardendale on a Sunday night. A makeshift paper sign taped over a real estate sign announced the Klan Rally.
The first lynching tree I photographed was Michael Donald’s in Mobile. I opened the Sunday Times on November 1, 1987 and I saw Jesse Kornbluth’s article “The Woman Who Beat the Klan” on the cover. It was about the lynching of Michael Donald and the successful judgement awarded his mother of seven million dollars. She didn’t receive seven million dollars , after the sale of property and garnishing of wages she received $225k but the judgement essentially bankrupted the Klan and made it impossible for them to buy land or operate in any manner that used collateral because any assets would have to go to Buelah Mae Donald. Morris Dees of the Southern Poverty Law Center, said that it was a “verdict that marked the end of United Klans”.
I remember my father’s words from when I was a child, he said “they just left the body hanging there for everyone to see.”