The Lynching

The Epic Courtroom Battle That Brought Down the Klan

Laurence Leamer

• Publisher: William Morrow
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780062458360
• eBook ISBN: 9780062458353
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African American History
• Index: History

The New York Times bestselling author of The Kennedy Women chronicles the powerful and spellbinding true story of a brutal race-based killing in 1981 and subsequent trials that undid one of the most pernicious organizations in American history—the Ku Klux Klan.

On a Friday night in March 1981 Henry Hays and James Knowles scoured the streets of Mobile in their car, hunting for a black man. The young men were members of Klavern 900 of the United Klans of America. They were seeking to retaliate after a largely black jury could not reach a verdict in a trial involving a black man accused of the murder of a white man. The two Klansmen found nineteen-year-old Michael Donald walking home alone. Hays and Knowles abducted him, beat him, cut his throat, and left his body hanging from a tree branch in a racially mixed residential neighborhood.

Arrested, charged, and convicted, Hays was sentenced to death—the first time in more than half a century that the state of Alabama sentenced a white man to death for killing a black man. On behalf of Michael’s grieving mother, Morris Dees, the legendary civil rights lawyer and cofounder of the Southern Poverty Law Center, filed a civil suit against the members of the local Klan unit involved and the UKA, the largest Klan organization. Charging them with conspiracy, Dees put the Klan on trial, resulting in a verdict that would level a deadly blow to its organization.

Based on numerous interviews and extensive archival research, The Lynching brings to life two dramatic trials, during which the Alabama Klan’s motives and philosophy were exposed for the evil they represent. In addition to telling a gripping and consequential story, Laurence Leamer chronicles the KKK and its activities in the second half the twentieth century, and illuminates its lingering effect on race relations in America today.

The Lynching includes sixteen pages of black-and-white photographs.

PART ONE

Night of the Burning Cross

Klan Business

AT THE WEEKLY meeting of Klavern 900 of the United Klans of America (UKA) in Theodore, Alabama, on March 18, 1981, Bennie Jack Hays stood before the dozen Klansmen and raged against the rise of black people. Bennie was the Great Titan, the highest-ranking officer of the UKA in the southern half of Alabama. The bespectacled, white-haired sixty-four-year-old might have spent his last years rocking his grandchildren on the porch, but he had risen quickly in the Klan despite being Catholic in an overwhelmingly Protestant organization that had once considered Catholics no better than infidels.

The Klan leader lived in a house on seven acres in Theodore, which was fifteen miles southwest of Mobile. Theodore was a poor white man’s redoubt, small homes and trailers spread out among the jungle-like foliage. It was as close to paradise as Bennie was likely to get, especially because he had a cabin for Klan meetings on his property.

The Klansmen attending the evening assembly sat in several rows of chairs. An altar-like shrine stood in the front of the room. There set a candle, a container of water, an open Bible, and an American flag with a cross laid across it. A Confederate flag stood in the corner.

“Your Excellency, the Sacred Altar of the Klan is prepared, the Fiery Cross illumines the Klavern,” said Thaddeus “Red” Betancourt, the Klokard or teacher, pointing to the lit candle.

“Klansmen, what means the Fiery Cross?” asked Bennie’s son-in-law Frank Cox, the Exalted Cyclops or Klavern president.

“We serve and sacrifice for the right,” said all the Klansmen.

No one in the Klavern spoke the sacred language with more passion than did Teddy Lamar Kyzar. He was a plump, expressionless young man with an enormous head and pink, baby-like skin. Kyzar stood just barely over five feet and looked like a boy among grown men. A few years before, a group of black men had stolen Kyzar’s watch. From then on, he had hated the whole race, and the Klan gave him the chance to strike back.

Some of his fellow Klansmen dismissed Kyzar because of his height, but that just compelled him to do almost anything to be accepted as their equal. He placed himself at the head of the line volunteering for what the UKA called “missionary work,” and his favorite involved beating up black men.

When the Klansmen had their victim bloodied, bruised, and spread-eagled on the ground, the last thing they did before walking away was to tell the man straight-out: “The cops are Klan, and you go to the cops, and we’ll come back and kill you.”

Kyzar lived in Mobile on Herndon Avenue in one of the four houses Bennie owned and had broken up into apartments. A few weeks earlier, the Klan leader had come to the street and thundered about whites watching black Mardi Gras parades.

For the next black parade, Bennie commanded that Kyzar and some other Klavern members slash tires all around the area and ordered that the tires be cut on the sides so they could not be patched and that at least two tires of each car be punctured. The Klansmen waited until the sounds of music and cheers wafted out across the streets and then started slashing and puncturing away. Kyzar bragged that he had damaged tires on sixty-five cars in one parking lot alone.

That had been a great day for Kyzar, but since then, he had gotten in trouble. He had taken a recruit’s application money and spent it at a bar. The Klavern could have decided he was not proper Klan material and thrown him out. But he was liked by a number of Klan members, and the group decided instead that they would whip him.

Kyzar shuffled to the front of the room. If he had walked out of the meeting, no one would have stopped him, but these were his friends and he was part of what he considered a marvelous kinship, and he knew he had to take his punishment.

Per protocol, the sacred items were taken off the altar, and Kyzar knelt down with his hands on the wooden surface. After a few words justifying and ennobling what was about to take place, the Exalted Cyclops hit him with a leather belt. Kyzar tried not to flinch or to show any pain, but he was close to crying. After the Exalted Cyclops struck him the last of the required fifty lashes, Kyzar limped back to his seat.

The men deferred to Bennie not only because he was the Great Titan, but also because they saw him as a man of a substance far beyond theirs. Bennie also had all kinds of properties and business interests to which they could hardly dare aspire.

He was born Herman Otto Houston in rural Missouri in 1916. His own father was a drunk, and for a time, the family was so poor they lived in a tent on the riverbank. At age sixteen, the illiterate teenager left home for good.

Bennie loved to spin tales of how he had ridden the outlaw roads with the infamous Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow of criminal legend. It seemed an unlikely story, but Bennie had such vivid details that his family thought it was probably true. He talked too about what it was like jumping into some of the worst hellholes on the European front as a paratrooper in World War II. After the war, he was twice sent to prison, once for cattle rustling and then for check forging. In 1952, he saddled a horse and fled from the prison farm.

The escaped convict was able to build a new life for himself with a new name, Bennie Jack Hays. By the time the police tracked him down, he was married to Opal Grace Frazier and had two young sons, Raymond and Henry. While he served out his remaining time in prison, Opal picked cotton and had a daughter, Gail, by another man.

When Bennie was released, he moved with his wife and three children to Charleston, South Carolina. He worked tearing up old rail tracks from Texas to New York and was gone weeks at a time. That wasn’t getting him anywhere, and one day in 1969, he put the family’s meager belongings in a car and drove to Mobile for a new start.

He got together enough money to put a down payment on a Texaco gas station and later on another gas station and a house on Herndon Avenue and then several other rental houses along the block-long street. Forever a country boy, he moved the family out to Theodore once he had enough money from his growing businesses.

When Bennie’s three children were young, he struck them so hard with his belt it was as if he thought he could beat righteousness into them. Sometimes Bennie’s wrath grew to the point where he could not control it. When Opal saw him get that familiar look of glazed intensity, she stayed away from him. There was no telling what he would do, how he would strike out, and whom he would hurt. And then the fury would be gone, as suddenly and inexplicably as it began.

No one was more afraid of Bennie than his youngest son, Henry, and no one did more to upset the old man. His father even nicknamed him “half-assed Henry.” The scrawny, five-foot-eight-inch teenager had earned that title for among other things being caught in a hotel with two underage girls, and for having one grunt-level job after another, including parking cars in downtown Mobile with a bunch of black men.

In his late teens, Henry served in the U.S. Army, and once when he came home on leave, he owed his father some money. When the son didn’t pay, Bennie started chasing him around the yard with a hammer, threatening that he was going to kill him. A police siren sounded in the distance, and Bennie charged into the kitchen where his daughter-in-law Denise Hays was standing, holding her nine-month-old in her arms.

“You called the cops!” Bennie screamed, and reached to punch Denise in the face with his fist.

“No, I did,” said his fourteen-year-old daughter, Gail, lying to protect Denise.

He loved his adopted daughter more than anyone else in the family, but he knocked her to the ground and was kicking her when the police entered the kitchen and stopped him. His friends in the police force protected him from punishment, but Henry was terrified. He left that day and did not come back for several years.

When Henry was thrown out of the army after he was caught in the barracks with an officer’s daughter, he returned to Mobile. He was pulled toward his father, who controlled all their lives, dominating them, pushing them where he wanted them to go.

Henry’s older brother, Raymond, had been married to Denise from 1972 to 1975, and the couple had two children. Bennie asked Henry to marry his brother’s ex-wife to keep his grandchildren close and so Raymond could avoid paying alimony. Those were pathetic reasons to marry, but to please his father, Henry went along.

There may have been another reason Bennie wanted to keep Denise close to him. She claimed that her father-in-law struck her when she refused to sleep with him. “We used to get in run-ins with him all the time, mostly because I wouldn’t go to bed with him,” Denise said.

Bennie felt his biggest problem was trying to help his youngest son shape up. At one point, Bennie told Henry he would find him a job in construction. He would even give him a free apartment in one of the houses he owned on Herndon Avenue in exchange for collecting rents and watching over his interests. All Henry had to do was to join his father in the Klan.

Bennie hoped the Klan would give Henry discipline and purpose. “You’ve got to join the Klan,” Bennie told his youngest son. “You’ve got to be respectable.” On the cold day in November 1977 when Henry was initiated, he felt like an “altar boy” as the black-hooded Nighthawk led Henry and five other recruits into the ceremony.

Henry believed that joining the Klan would bring him closer to his father, something he had sought all his life. And he would be somebody. Bennie even made Henry the Exalted Cyclops, the highest position in Klavern 900, but when he did not handle the position well, Bennie gave the honor to Gail’s husband, Frank Cox, and made Henry the Kligrapp, or secretary.

Even when Henry was a grown man, Bennie kept trying to teach his youngest son how he thought he should behave. Bennie had a white German shepherd named White Hope who kept trying to dig a hole under the fence that kept him in the yard. One day Bennie told his son to get the dog and hold it tightly. Then he took a knife and cut off the toes on White Hope’s front paws before dipping the bloody stumps in hot tar. That’s how the dog learned its lesson. Bennie felt Henry couldn’t face it. He was a grown man, but he ran in the house crying.

Bennie thought more highly of Frank Cox than he did of his own son. Cox was a brawny, self-confident young man who appeared unlikely to spend his whole life working as a truck driver. He was wildly in love with his young wife, Gail, and joined the Klan primarily to ingratiate himself with his father-in-law. He and his wife had gone off to North Carolina where they had a happy life. But they had returned. Frank was willing to go far to please his father-in-law. That was something almost no outsider understood: the almost hypnotic power this rude man had over those who came within his shadow.

Bennie’s favorite Klansman was James “Tiger” Knowles, a seventeen-year-old with a take-charge manner that made him seem half a dozen years older. The husky, five-foot-eleven-inch-tall teenager was nicknamed “Tiger” because he weighed a whopping thirteen pounds when he was born. When Tiger was in the ninth grade, the Feds charged his father, a Klansman, with tax evasion, and he lost his construction company. Tiger dropped out of school for good and made good money as a plumber. For a while he ran a small business renovating kitchens and laying tile while overseeing half a dozen or so employees, including Henry.

In 1978, Knowles attended the annual UKA Klanvocation with his parents. At the convention, the teenager was given the first Klan youth charter in the state. At sixteen, Knowles took the oath to become a full-fledged adult member of the UKA. A few months later, Imperial Wizard Robert Marvin Shelton named the teenager Klaliff, which put him in charge of “military activities” in the southern half of Alabama and made him one of the top Klansmen in the entire state. Although Knowles was a member of the Klavern in Grand Bay, fifteen miles away, he frequently attended the Theodore Klavern.

Often Knowles drove with Bennie to the UKA national headquarters, a 7,200-square-foot building in Northport, outside Tuscaloosa, for Imperial Wizard Shelton’s monthly meeting with the leaders of the Alabama Klaverns. The teenager believed that one day he would wear the resplendent robes of the Imperial Wizard, the greatest Klansman in America.

Knowles despised anyone who seemed weird to him. Once, he and another Klavern member, Johnny Matthew Jones, were driving in Knowles’s truck when they spotted a long-haired hitchhiker. They picked him up, cut off his hair with their pocketknives, and left him on the side of the road.

On the night before the weekly Klavern meeting on March 17, 1981, Henry and Knowles had gone out for a little missionary work of their own. The Klan had no more use for homosexuals than it did for black and Jewish Americans. The two young Klansmen convinced a gay man to go off in their car to a nightclub. Instead they put a knife to his neck and drove him out the causeway into the wilderness. There they made him strip, and while they debated what to do with him, he ran off into the woods, and the two friends sped off in Henry’s Buick Wildcat sedan. In the atavistic excitement of the moment, they might have killed him if he had not gotten away.

A Public Display

NEAR THE END of the March 18 Klavern meeting in Bennie’s run-down, tin-roofed cabin, Red Betancourt walked in front of the dozen Klavern members and stood before the altar. He was a genial, accommodating man who had joined the Klavern after a group of four Klansmen showed up at his house in Mobile one night. One of the men was his next-door neighbor; he said Betancourt was beating his children far beyond necessity. Betancourt convinced them that was not true. And in the course of this exchange, the men impressed him, and he asked to join the Klan.

Betancourt had served time for burglary, and he, like so many others, had found in the Klan a purpose and kinship he hadn’t found anywhere else. He had no special animus toward black people. His father had worked in the Mobile shipyards as a skilled laborer, earning enough money so the family had a full-time black maid paid five dollars a week. Almost everyone in the Betancourts’ apartment complex had a black maid and paid her the standard wage. This was one of the perks of being a white person of even modest means. When Red went with his family to downtown Mobile, they rarely saw a black person, and Betancourt grew up thinking of African Americans as a race of housemaids and servants who otherwise stayed out of view.

Betancourt yearned to be one of the trusted Klan insiders. He saw early on that you got there much faster through deeds than you did merely with words, and that led him to go out burning crosses and beating up black people. He believed that if he continued doing that and keeping his mouth shut, one day he probably would be privy to the Klan’s most intimate secrets and plans.

One of Betancourt’s offici...

Table of contents

• Dedication
• Contents
• Prologue: Fists Against the Earth
• Part One: Night of the Burning Cross
• Part Two: A Time of Judgment
• Part Three: Roll Call of Justice
• Where Are They Now?
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Photos Section
• About the Author
• Also by Laurence Leamer
• Credits
• Copyright
• About the Publisher