The Nation - News from May 19, 1989

An all-white jury in Mobile, Ala., convicted a former Ku Klux Klansman of murder for supplying the rope and pistol used to abduct and kill a black teen-ager who was strangled and strung up in a tree. The conviction of Benjamin Franklin Cox, 27, was the third successful prosecution in six years in the 1981 slaying of 19-year-old Michael Donald. A federal jury in 1987 ordered the United Klans of America, then the nation’s biggest klan organization, to pay $7 million to Donald’s mother. Cox whispered, “I love you” to his weeping wife, Gail, before he was led away in handcuffs. Cox, a truck driver, could receive 10 years to life in prison. Circuit Judge Michael Zoghby revoked Cox’s $28,000 bail and set sentencing for June 23.