There had been rumors that all of the defendants in the Pool case were Klan members, however none of this was ever presented in court. It stated that James Caston had informed an FBI agent that he was a member of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. Weeks after the verdict, local newspaper investigations discovered an FBI report from April 15, 1970. In November 1999 James “Doc” Caston, 66, his brother Charles Ernie Caston, 64, and his half-brother Hal Spivey Crimm 50, were convicted of manslaughter by a state jury and sentenced to serve 20 years in prison. Dennis Newton was acquitted by a jury and, Joe Oliver Watson pled to manslaughter and agreed to testify against the remaining men. Two were dead by the time of the fresh investigation. Seven white men were thought to be responsible for Pool’s death. Indictments followed, but on the request of the prosecutor, in July 1970 the state circuit court granted a nolle proseque (a formal notice of abandonment by a plaintiff or prosecutor).Īfter twenty-eight years, in 1999 at the request of Pool’s family the case was revived. In 1970, police detained four suspects, one of whom confessed. One of the perpetrators claimed Pool, who had one arm, was trying to take something from his truck. The men then threw Pool off a bridge into the Sunflower River at this location. The group of men assaulted Pool, rendering him unconscious, and loaded him in a pick-up truck. On April 12, 1970, Rainey Pool, a 54-year-old sharecropper from the town of Midnight in Humphries County, was killed by a group of white men. Hays is the only known member of the Ku Klux Klan to be executed during the 20th century for the murder of an African American.Īnguilla, MS. Henry Hays was sentenced to death by the electric chair on June 6, 1997. They then tightened a noose around his neck, before slitting his throat and hanging him from this tree across the street from a house owned by Klan leader Bennie Jack Hays. The two men kidnapped Donald and drove to another county where they beat Donald with a tree limb. At random, they spotted Michael Donald walking home after buying his sister a pack of cigarettes. After the declaration of a mistrial regarding an African American being charged with the murder of a white policeman in Mobile, Alabama, Bennie Jack Hays, the second-highest-ranking officer in the United Klans of America said “If a black man can get away with killing a white man, we ought to be able to get away with killing a black man.”Īrmed with a gun and rope, Bennie Hays’s 26-year old son Henry Hays and 17-year old LIewellyn Knowles drove around Mobile looking for black to attack.
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