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School marks Confederate Memorial Day with lynching teach-in

Alabama Confederate Monument
Wikimedia

MONTGOMERY, Ala. (AP) — A historically black college in Alabama is using the state's Confederate Memorial Day to highlight the 1981 lynching of a black teenager by Ku Klux Klan members.

A "teach-in" about the slaying of 19-year-old Michael Donald was planned Monday at Alabama State University in Montgomery. Meanwhile, Confederate history buffs gathered outside Alabama's Capitol for an event honoring rebel dead.

Donald was killed and his body was hanged from a tree in Mobile. Two Klansmen were convicted of killing Donald in response to a jury's failure to convict a black man in the slaying of a white police officer.

Teach-in organizer Derryn Moten of Alabama State says Confederate veterans founded the KKK, and the event presents another side of the legacy of the Confederacy.

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