The article of which he was most proud was “The Woman Who Beat the Klan,” published in The Times Magazine in 1987, about Beulah Mae Donald, who sued the Ku Klux Klan for the 1981 murder of her son — he was hanged from a tree, with his throat slit, and no one was charged with the crime — and won.
In 2023, he wrote about how he came to that story. The Southern Poverty Law Center had sent a postcard photo of 19-year-old Michael Donald, hanging from a tree, as a fund-raising request. It was a horrific image, yet for months Mr. Kornbluth displayed it on his fireplace mantel. He had no idea, at first, why he kept it there.
“Every time I looked at it,” he said, “I had to turn away. It took me months to realize that the postcard was actionable. I was supposed to do something about it.”
Jesse Lyle Kornbluth was born on Jan. 4, 1946, in Queens, the eldest of two sons. His father, Samuel Kornbluth, was a controller at Macy’s, and his mother, Pearl (Greenwald) Kornbluth, worked first for her husband and then as a coat-and-suit buyer in another department store. The family moved often for Samuel’s work, to Kansas City, Houston and elsewhere.
Pearl Kornbluth wanted her sons to go to the Groton School, a prep school, but, Mr. Kornbluth wrote at her death in 2020, the director of admissions told her, “There’s only one Jew at Groton” — a math teacher. Milton Academy, in Milton, Mass., accepted both boys, after which they both went to Harvard. Jesse graduated in 1968, with a degree in English.
