Leo Frank
Leo Max Frank was an American lynching victim wrongly convicted of the murder of 13-year-old Mary Phagan, an employee in a factory in Atlanta, Georgia, where he was the superintendent. Frank's trial, conviction, and unsuccessful appeals attracted national attention. His kidnapping from prison and lynching became the focus of social, regional, political, and racial concerns, particularly regarding antisemitism. Modern researchers agree that Frank was innocent.
Born to a Jewish-American family in Texas, Frank was raised in New York and earned a degree in mechanical engineering from Cornell University in 1906 before moving to Atlanta in 1908. Marrying Lucille Selig in 1910, he involved himself with the city's Jewish community and was elected president of the Atlanta chapter of the B'nai B'rith, a Jewish fraternal organization, in 1912. At that time, there were growing concerns regarding child labor at factories. One of these children was Mary Phagan, who worked at the National Pencil Company where Frank was director. The girl was strangled on April 26, 1913, and found dead in the factory's cellar the next morning. Two notes, made to look as if she had written them, were found beside her body. Based on the mention of a "night witch", they implicated the night watchman, Newt Lee. Over the course of their investigations, the police arrested several men, including Lee, Frank, and Jim Conley, a janitor at the factory.
On May 24, 1913, Frank was indicted on a charge of murder and the case opened at Fulton County Superior Court, on July 28. The prosecution relied heavily on the testimony of Conley, who described himself as an accomplice in the aftermath of the murder, and who the defense at the trial argued was, in fact, the murderer, as many historians and researchers now believe. A guilty verdict was announced on August 25. Frank and his lawyers made a series of unsuccessful appeals; their final appeal to the Supreme Court of the United States failed in April 1915. Considering arguments from both sides as well as evidence not available at trial, Governor John M. Slaton commuted Frank's sentence from death to life imprisonment.
The case attracted national press attention and many reporters deemed the conviction a travesty. Within Georgia, this outside criticism fueled antisemitism and hatred toward Frank. On August 16, 1915, he was kidnapped from prison by a group of armed men, and lynched at Marietta, Mary Phagan's hometown, the next morning. The new governor vowed to punish the lynchers, who included prominent Marietta citizens, but nobody was charged. In 1986, the Georgia State Board of Pardons and Paroles issued a pardon in recognition of the state's failures—including to protect Frank and preserve his opportunity to appeal—but took no stance on Frank's guilt or innocence. The case has inspired books, movies, a play, a musical, and a TV miniseries.
Many African Americans opposed what historian Nancy MacLean described as a "virulently racist" characterization of Jim Conley, who was black, by the Frank defense. She wrote that, "the black press later condemned Frank's lynching as they did all lynching."
His case spurred the creation of the Anti-Defamation League and the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan.
Background
Social and economic conditions
In the early 20th century, Atlanta, Georgia's capital city, underwent significant economic and social change. To serve a growing economy based on manufacturing and commerce, many people left the countryside to relocate in Atlanta. Men from the traditional rural society felt it degrading that women were moving to the city to work in factories.During this era, Atlanta's rabbis and Jewish community leaders helped to resolve animosity toward Jews. In the half-century from 1895, David Marx was a prominent figure in the city. In order to aid assimilation, Marx's Reform temple adopted Americanized appearances. Friction developed between the city's German Jews, who were integrated, and Russian Jews who had recently immigrated. Marx said the new Russian Jews were "barbaric and ignorant" and believed their presence would create new antisemitic attitudes and a situation which made possible Frank's guilty verdict. Despite their success, many Jews recognized themselves as different from the Gentile majority and were uncomfortable with their image. Despite his own acceptance by Gentiles, Marx believed that "in isolated instances there is no prejudice entertained for the individual Jew, but there exists wide-spread and deep seated prejudice against Jews as an entire people."
An example of the type of tension that Marx feared occurred in April 1913: at a conference on child labor, some participants blamed the problem, in part, on the fact that many factories were Jewish-owned. Historian Leonard Dinnerstein summarized Atlanta's situation in 1913 as follows:
Early life
Leo Max Frank was born in Cuero, Texas on April 17, 1884, to Rudolph Frank and Rachel "Rae" Jacobs, who were both of German-Jewish descent. The family moved to Brooklyn when Leo was three months old. He attended New York City public schools and graduated from Pratt Institute in 1902. He then attended Cornell University, where he studied mechanical engineering. At Cornell, Frank was a member of the H. Morse Stephens Debate Club. After graduating in 1906, he worked briefly as a draftsman and as a testing engineer.At the invitation of his uncle Moses Frank, Leo traveled to Atlanta for two weeks in late October 1907, to meet a delegation of investors for a position with the National Pencil Company, a manufacturing plant in which Moses was a major shareholder. Frank accepted the position, and traveled to Germany to study pencil manufacturing at the Eberhard Faber pencil factory. After a nine-month apprenticeship, Frank returned to the United States and began working at the National Pencil Company in August 1908. Frank became superintendent of the factory the following month, earning $180 per month plus a portion of the factory's profits.
Frank was introduced to Lucille Selig shortly after he arrived in Atlanta. She came from a prominent, upper-middle class Jewish family of industrialists who, two generations earlier, had founded the first synagogue in Atlanta. They married in November 1910. Frank described his married life as happy.
In 1912, Frank was elected president of the Atlanta chapter of the B'nai B'rith, a Jewish fraternal organization. The Jewish community in Atlanta was the largest in the Southern United States, and the Franks belonged to a cultured and philanthropic community whose leisure pursuits included opera and bridge. Although the Southern United States was not specifically known for its antisemitism, Frank's northern culture and Jewish faith added to the sense that he was different.
Murder of Mary Phagan
Phagan's early life
Mary Phagan was born on June 1, 1899, into a Georgia family of tenant farmers. Her father died before she was born. Shortly after Mary's birth, her mother, Frances Phagan, moved the family back to their hometown of Marietta, Georgia. During or after 1907, they again relocated to East Point, Georgia, in southwest Atlanta, where Frances opened a boarding house. Phagan left school at age 10 to work part-time in a textile mill. In 1912, after her mother married John William Coleman, the family moved into the city of Atlanta. That spring, Phagan took a job with the National Pencil Company, where she earned ten cents an hour operating a knurling machine that inserted rubber erasers into the metal tips of pencils, and worked 55 hours per week. She worked across the hallway from Leo Frank's office.Discovery of Phagan's body
On April 21, 1913, Phagan was laid off due to a materials shortage. Around noon on April 26, she went to the factory to claim her pay. The next day, shortly before 3:00 a.m., the factory's night watchman, Newt Lee, went to the factory basement to use the toilet. After leaving the toilet, Lee discovered Phagan's body in the rear of the basement near an incinerator and called the police.Her dress was up around her waist and a strip from her petticoat had been torn off and wrapped around her neck. Her face was blackened and scratched, and her head was bruised and battered. A strip of wrapping cord was tied into a loop around her neck, buried deep, showing that she had been strangled. Her underwear was still around her hips, but stained with blood and torn open. Her skin was covered with ashes and dirt from the floor, initially making it appear to first responding officers that she and her assailant had struggled in the basement.
A service ramp at the rear of the basement led to a sliding door that opened into an alley; the police found the door had been tampered with so it could be opened without unlocking it. Later examination found bloody fingerprints on the door, as well as a metal pipe that had been used as a crowbar. Some evidence at the crime scene was improperly handled by the police investigators: a trail in the dirt along which police believed Phagan had been dragged was trampled; the footprints were never identified.
Two notes were found in a pile of rubbish by Phagan's head, and became known as the "murder notes". One said: "he said he wood love me land down play like the night witch did it but that long tall black negro did boy his slef." The other said, "mam that negro hire down here did this i went to make water and he push me down that hole a long tall negro black that hoo it wase long sleam tall negro i write while play with me." The phrase "night witch" was thought to mean "night watch"; when the notes were initially read aloud, Lee, who was black, said: "Boss, it looks like they are trying to lay it on me." Lee was arrested that morning based on these notes and his apparent familiarity with the bodyhe stated that the girl was white, when the police, because of the filth and darkness in the basement, initially thought she was black. A trail leading back to the elevator suggested to police that the body had been moved by Lee.