Yesterday, we lost a cherished member of our family.
We got Sunny at the start of our second term in the White House, and all of us – including our first dog, Bo – immediately fell in love. We also had trouble keeping up with her, for Sunny was a force of nature. Athletic and full of boundless energy, she leapt over the hedges on the South Lawn like they weren’t even there, chasing squirrels, birds and anything else that moved. And whereas the way to Bo’s heart usually involved a treat, Sunny was more interested in having us run around with her, roll on the floor with her, or have her belly rubbed for as long as we were willing.
She loved the girls, even if they were pestering her when she was napping. She loved our team, and would often follow them around, helping them on the job. She was fiercely protective of Bo, who she rightly sensed wasn’t always as alert and attentive as she was. She had her eccentricities: other than Bo, she preferred people to dogs; she was a loud and sloppy drinker; and despite being a Portuguese Water Dog, she hated getting wet.
But as far as our family was concerned, she was pretty much perfect, and for thirteen years, she would be by our side – always loyal, always sweet, always ready for adventure, still fiery and gorgeous till the very end of her days.
We will miss her terribly, and imagine she’s with her big brother now, making sure he’s okay.
Mom asked me if I “think AI could kill us?” Told her they made a movie abt it called “Avengers: Age of Ultron”. She proceeds to say “that would lead to our doomsday”
Two Klansmen drove around Mobile, Alabama looking for any Black person to kill. They found a 19-year-old walking to the store for cigarettes.
His mother spent the next six years dismantling the Ku Klux Klan in a courtroom. Michael Donald. March 1981.
They beat him, killed him, and hung his body from a tree on a residential street, across from a Klansman's house, so the city would see it in the morning.
Police initially suggested it was a drug deal.
It was not. It was a Klan retaliation for a jury's failure to convict a Black defendant in another case — a life taken at random to send a message.
Beulah Mae Donald refused every version of the story except the true one. She pushed until the FBI reopened it. One killer confessed. The other was executed in 1997 — the first white man executed in Alabama for killing a Black person since 1913.
Then she did the thing nobody expected. She sued the United Klans of America itself.
In 1987 an all-white Alabama jury awarded her seven million dollars. The Klan had no money — so it handed over its national headquarters building. The organization was finished.
A mother buried her son and bankrupted the Ku Klux Klan.