March 14, 2005
Leo Frank (photograph c. 1915)
The Lynching of Leo Frank
by
Denise Noe
At
approximately 3 a.m. on Sunday, April 27, 1913, the night watchman of the
National Pencil Company in Atlanta discovered a girl's brutally battered body in
the factory's basement. Covered with sawdust, her skull was caked with dried
blood, her eyes were bruised, her face scratched and bruised and some of her
fingers out of joint. A piece of rope, along with a strip taken from her own
underpants, encircled her neck.
She was soon identified as 13-year-old Mary
Phagan, the child of a working-class family. She had been employed at the
factory putting metal tips on pencils. She had recently been laid off because
the factory had run out of the metal required for her job. On Saturday, April
26, 1913, Confederate Memorial Day in Atlanta, she planned to see the parade but
first wanted to stop off at the factory to collect $1.20 in wages owed her.
The killing captured the Monday headlines and news about it would appear on
the front pages of Atlanta newspapers for more than a year afterward. Much of
Atlanta suffered a paroxysm of grief over this murder. About 10,000 people
showed up at the morgue and over 1,000 attended her funeral. Those grieving over
this stranger were nicknamed ''Mary's People'' while she became known as ''the
little factory girl.''
The crime touched an exposed nerve because it
symbolized the vulnerability of young women during a time when the South was
transitioning from a rural to an urban economy. During the first two decades of
the 20th century many ruined farmers migrated to the city where they,
their wives, and often their children, got jobs in factories.
In death, Mary Phagan became the psychological
sister and daughter of many Georgians because her killing symbolized the deepest
fears they had for their own female relatives and young women in general. Public
outcry meant the police were under tremendous pressure to solve this homicide.
Atlanta's mayor warned the police: ''Find this murderer fast, or be fired!''
Two semi-literate notes were found beside her
corpse. One read: ''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 wright while play with me.'' The other read: ''he said he wood
love me land down play like the night witch did it but that long tall black
negro did buy his slef.''
The notes appeared to either point to the night
watchman who had found her body, an African-American named Newt Lee who was
tall, slim and dark skinned or to William Nolle, a tall black who worked in the
basement of the factory. ''Night witch'' could be a misspelling of ''night watch.''
Lee was arrested. Police held him while arresting others. The ''hole'' referred to
seemed to be the factory chute.
But police attention soon focused on another
suspect: factory superintendent, Leo Frank, the last person known to have seen
Mary alive.
Leo Frank, at age 24, had left Brooklyn in 1908
for Atlanta to become superintendent of the National Pencil Company's factory.
He wed Lucille Selig in 1910. A pretty but heavyset young woman, she had
artistic inclinations and a mischievous side. According to Steve Oney in
And
the Dead Shall Rise, she was initially attracted to Leo ''because I liked to
make him blush.'' The couple did not have children.
Frank was elected president of the Atlanta
chapter of B'nai B'rith, a Jewish fraternal organization, in 1913. Albert
Lindemann in
The Jew Accused wrote that Frank ''appointed a committee . .
. to investigate the complaints against Jewish caricatures that are becoming so
frequent on the local stage.''
Four hours after the discovery of Mary's body,
police visited the 29-year-old Frank at his home. A nervous Frank initially
denied knowing Mary, although he soon recalled a girl who had come for her
wages.
Police took Frank to the place where the body
had been discovered. The group got into the elevator and descended to the
basement. As Steve Oney wrote in his book about the murder: ''The instant the
lift hit bottom, a powerful stench wafted up from beneath the men'' as the lift
smashed human feces. The significance of the feces would not be realized until
much later.
On Tuesday, April 29, police arrested Frank. Lindemann has pointed out that
the police first suspected Frank for ''a number of perfectly legitimate reasons
having nothing to do with his Jewishness. First, he was one of the few in the
factory on the day . . . of the murder. Since it was never seriously questioned
that the murder took place in the factory, he automatically became one of a few
natural suspects.''
Physical evidence appeared to point to Frank.
Spots that looked like blood were found in the metal workroom across from his
office, as were hairs around the lathe. Witnesses said the hair was Mary's.
Neither of these supposed links would stand up
to scrutiny. At Frank's trial, a detective would testify that authorities did
not know with certainty that the stains were in fact blood. It would not come
out until after Frank's trial, but a biologist would find that the hair strands
were not Mary's.
The Indictment of Leo Frank
On Wednesday, April 30, 1913 a Coroner's Jury
inquest convened and the prosecution of Leo Frank commenced. Erroneous evidence
given at the inquest and widely reported painted Frank as a menace to young
women. An acquaintance of Mary's named George Epps testified that he had ridden
into town with her on the last day of her life. Bruce L. Jordan wrote in
Murder in the Peach State, ''Epps claimed that he had been told that day by
Mary that she was afraid of her boss, Leo Frank, because he was too familiar
with her and made advances towards her.'' However, as Jordan further wrote, ''Epps
had been interviewed by an Atlanta Georgian reporter a few days earlier
and had said only that he sometimes rode to town with her. During that interview
Epps said nothing of having ridden to town with her the day she was killed.''
After the Coroner's Jury's inquest, more bogus
evidence damning Frank surfaced. A police officer claimed to have found Frank in
a wooded area with a girl and that Frank had admitted taking her there for
''immoral purposes.'' This same police officer would later admit that he had made
a mistaken identification, but this information did not appear on the front
pages of the newspapers.
''On May 23, the Atlanta police released an
affidavit from Mrs. Nina Formby, the proprietor of a 'rooming house' in Atlanta,
disclosing that on the day of the murder Frank had telephoned her repeatedly and
had attempted to secure a room for himself and a young girl,'' Leonard
Dinnerstein wrote in
The Leo Frank Case. Her maid disputed Mrs. Formby's
story about Frank making a call to her rooming house. Quoting Dinnerstein, ''In
the middle of June the maid . . . said that the detectives had been pestering
her on numerous occasions to make an affidavit supporting Mrs. Formby's
contention that Frank had phoned several times for a room on the evening of the
murder. The maid refused because she claimed that there had been no such call
that evening, and if there had been she certainly would have answered the
phone.''
The most damaging evidence against Frank came
from 27-year-old Jim Conley, the janitor at the pencil factory, a heavy drinker
with a criminal record. According to Bruce L. Jordan's Murder in the Peach
State, Conley had ''several previous arrests for theft and disorderly
conduct.'' Conley, a short, stocky, light-skinned African-American, had
been arrested in connection with the Phagan murder on May 1 after a factory
foreman told police he had seen Conley trying to wash what looked like
bloodstains from a shirt. According to Oney, Conley told police ''
he'd just been
trying to rinse away some rust marks because he had nothing else to wear to the
coroner's inquest.'' Authorities believed despite being in possession of two
semi-literate notes left near Phagan's corpse that Conley could not be the
killer because he had told them he was illiterate.
On May 16, the police found out Conley was
semi-literate. Exactly how they discovered this was disputed. Frank always
claimed he was the source of this finding. Oney wrote that, ''
in the report the
agents submitted to both defense counsel and police, they failed to mention
Frank's contribution.'' Rather, they said assistant superintendents and the day
watchman of the factory were the sources for this information. They discovered
that Conley had written notes to a firm from which he was buying a watch on
installment and confronted him with his own signature.
Police insisted Conley write what they
dictated: the Phagan notes. What Conley wrote was almost identical to the
originals.
The janitor admitted he wrote the originals but
claimed they had also been dictated to him by Frank. Conley would tell three
stories pinning the murder on Frank. In the first, as Jordan wrote, Conley said
''
he had been summoned to Leo Frank's office the day before the murder and
ordered to write them. Conley claimed in this first affidavit that while writing
the note for his boss, Frank mumbled what Conley believed to be, 'Why should I
hang? I've got wealthy people in Brooklyn.' Conley also initially claimed that
he was not even in the factory on the day of the murder.'' This story meant that
Frank had plotted the murder at least a day in advance. Police found this
unbelievable because they did not think the murder had been premeditated.
Pressed, Conley changed his story, admitting he
had been at the factory and had written the notes on the day of the killing, but
he still denied knowing anything else.
On their third try, the police pulled from
Conley the story they would go with. Conley claimed that Frank had summoned him
to his office. He stated that the superintendent told him that he had let a girl
fall against a machine in the metal room and wanted him to bring her out of the
room. Conley said he went into it and found the girl dead. He said he reported
this to Frank who asked him to help carry the body to the elevator. Conley said
the two of them together took the corpse to the basement and left her in the
corner. Afterwards, the pair returned to Frank's office where Frank dictated and
Conley penned the notes.
Given the South's history of anti-black prejudice, why was Conley's word
accepted instead of Frank's? After all, Frank was a successful businessman with
no criminal record.
Part of the explanation lies, as Dinnerstein
noted, in the ''alien'' image Frank projected ''as a Northerner, an industrialist,
and a Jew.'' Dinnerstein quotes a pastor saying, ''when . . . the police arrested
a Jew, and a Yankee Jew at that, all of the inborn prejudice against Jews rose
up in a feeling of satisfaction.''
Conley understood racist ideology and
manipulated it. He explained his complicity by saying, ''I was willing to do
anything to help Mr. Frank because he was a white man and my superintendent.''
Adopting this Uncle Tom persona won over investigators. In essence, Conley told
a story that was vivid with detail that supported the investigators'
preconceived notions regarding Frank's guilt.
Atlanta's Solicitor-General Hugh Dorsey took
charge of the case. He met with a grand jury on May 23 and the next day, he
announced the indictment of Leo Frank.
The Trial
Frank's trial began July 28, 1913. Two
respected Georgia lawyers, Luther Rosser and Reuben Arnold, represented him.
Frank Hooper assisted Solicitor Dorsey with the prosecution. The Judge Leonard
S. Roan presided.
Spectators packed the courtroom and a throng
gathered outside it. The temper of that crowd was so anti-Frank that the police
had many officers guarding the courtroom throughout the trial.
Lucile Frank sat close behind her husband each
day of the trial. She was unwavering in her belief in his innocence and
integrity. To the press she said, ''He ever has been just the plain, more or less
studious and serious minded Leo, gentle and thoughtful, sincere and true.''
The state put on witnesses who said Mary's
hairs were on a lathe in the second-floor workroom across from Frank's office.
They put on doctors who testified that she died between noon and 12:15 p.m.
Employee Monteen Stover took the stand to
discredit Frank's story that he had not left his office between noon and 12:30
p.m. and that he had handed the money due Mary to her sometime between 12:05
p.m. and 12:10 p.m. Stover said she had arrived at 12:05 p.m. and not seen Frank
in his office.
Detective Starnes testified that he saw red
stains in the workroom but acknowledged on cross-examination that he could not
know if they were blood.
Conley was the prosecution's star witness. Both
Dinnerstein and Oney record that he testified that Frank had told him he was
expecting a young lady to come to his office for a ''chat.'' Conley also told the
court that he regularly ''watched out'' for Frank when ladies visited him.
According to his story, when Frank stamped his foot Conley would lock the front
door, then unlock it after hearing Frank whistle.
On this day, Conley claimed to have seen Mary
go upstairs. He also said he heard footsteps going in the direction of the
workroom and heard a scream. He said that after that scream, he saw Stover go to
the second floor.
He recalled the signal of the stomping foot and
locking the front door, hearing the whistle, then unlocking the door and
trekking up to Frank's office.
Conley said that when he got to Frank's office
that Frank was ''shivering and trembling and rubbing his hands.'' In those hands,
Conley said, Frank held a piece of rope. Conley testified that Frank asked him
if he had seen ''that little girl who passed here just a while ago?'' Conley said
he answered that he had seen ''one come along there and she came back again, and
then I saw another one come along there and she hasn't been back down.''
Conley quoted Frank as confiding, ''I wanted to
be with the little girl, and she refused me, and I struck her and I guess I
struck her too hard and she fell and hit her head against something.'' Conley
further claimed Frank told him to go to the workroom and see how she was. He
found her dead, and reported that back to Frank. Conley then described how the
two of them together took Mary's body onto the elevator, then left it in the
basement.
They returned to Frank's office, where Frank
dictated the notes found next to Mary's body.
Rosser and Arnold cross-examined him for three
days but were unable to shake him on anything substantive.
They did draw a disclosure which they failed to pursue that could have
proved vital to Frank's defense. Under cross-examination, Conley testified that
he had defecated at the bottom of the elevator shaft on the morning of the
murder. Later, others examining the facts in this case would see this admission
as key to the real murderer.
Conley had been well prepped for
cross-examination by his own lawyer, William Smith. As Oney wrote, ''Smith, a
fair mimic, gave [Conley] a taste of . . . Rosser's corrosive manner, preparing
him for the inevitable courtroom encounter.'' Smith said he hoped ''to render
Conley impervious to cross-examination'' and he had.
The prosecution, as it had at the inquest,
called a number of former pencil factory female employees to testify that Frank
had taken various ''liberties'' with them. Frank's attorneys did not elect to
cross-examine any of them at trial. The defense called a number of character
witnesses, several of them women who worked at the pencil factory. Each
testified that Frank's conduct had been unimpeachable. The defense also called
witnesses who claimed Conley had a reputation for lying.
The defense put on witnesses to show that Frank
simply did not have the time to do all the things Conley said he had done.
According to Dinnerstein, Conley testified that Mary Phagan had been in the
pencil factory prior to Monteen Stover's arrival. Stover said she had been
outside Frank's office from 12:05 to 12:10 p.m. However, both the motorman and
conductor of the trolley Phagan took claimed she left the car at 12:10 p.m.
Defense doctors disputed the time at which
their prosecution counterparts had pinpointed her death.
Under Georgia law at the time a defendant in a
capital case may take the stand in his own defense without being subjected to
cross-examination by the prosecution. The defendant's statement is unsworn. It
is up to the jury to determine its value. Frank took the stand to give his
statement. He testified he left the factory to go home for lunch at 1 p.m.
Several defense witnesses took the stand to say they had seen him between 1 p.m.
and 1:30 p.m., contradicting Conley's assertion that the two of them had been in
the factory at that time. To murder the child, transport her body to the
basement, return to the office and write the murder notes would have taken at
least half an hour according to Conley, other witnesses, and common sense. Yet
all of Frank's time during the supposed period when he was about his dirty work
was accounted for save a period of approximately 18 minutes between 12:01 and
12:20 p.m. The Atlanta Constitution observed that the ''chain of
testimony, forged with a number of links, has established a seemingly
unbreakable corroboration of Frank's account of his whereabouts.''
Frank testified that Monteen Stover may have
missed seeing him at his desk when she arrived because ''it is impossible for me
to see out into the outer hall when the safe door is open, as it was that
morning, and not only is it impossible for me to see out, but it is impossible
for people to see in and see me there.'' He also said he might have been
temporarily out of his office for a trip to the restroom. He derided Conley's
story as a ''tissue of lies.''
Lawyers for both sides rested after four weeks
of testimony. In his first closing argument, Dorsey called Frank a ''Dr. Jekyll
and Mr. Hyde,'' appearing to be a decent man to friends and family while cruelly
indulging his sexual appetites at the expense of young women.
In his closing, defense attorney Arnold brought
up the issue of anti-Semitism, saying, ''If Frank hadn't been a Jew there would
never had been any prosecution against him.''
Dorsey objected on his second summation by
saying that, ''the word Jew never escaped our lips.''
Outside the jury's presence, Judge Roan
summoned Frank's attorneys to the bench. According to Jordan, Roan, fearing
violence in the event of an acquittal, ''recommended that neither they nor Frank
attend the announcement of the verdict. The attorneys agreed without consulting
Frank.''
The jury convicted Frank of first-degree
murder. Albert S. Lindemann wrote in The Jew Accused, that, ''the
jubilation in the streets of Atlanta was extraordinary.'' Jordan wrote, ''When
Solicitor Dorsey exited the courthouse and reached the sidewalk, he was
physically lifted into the air by the cheering crowd and passed across the
street to his office with tears rolling down his cheeks, his hat raised over his
head, his feet never touching the ground until he reached his office.''
Frank was in his jail cell when he received the
news. Shocked, he exclaimed, ''My God! Even the jury was influenced by mob law.''
The next day Frank was sentenced to hang. Jim
Conley later pled guilty to being an accessory after the fact and was sentenced
to serve one year on a chain gang.
The Case Becomes a Cause
Frank's attorneys announced that they would
appeal. Little known outside the South prior to Frank's conviction, the case
gained notoriety in the North as investigators turned up evidence casting doubt
on the verdict.
The Atlanta Journal
revealed that, as Jordan recorded, ''the state
biologist had issued a report to Solicitor Dorsey shortly after Mary Phagan's
murder. After having examined with a microscope the hair found on a lathe in the
metal room, the biologist concluded in his report that the hair was not Mary
Phagan's.'' The Journal asked Dorsey why he withheld the report from the
jury and he replied that he relied on other witnesses who believed the hair was
hers.
Adding to doubts were prosecution witnesses'
recantations. According to Steve Oney in And the Dead Shall Rise, Albert
McKnight, husband of the Frank's family's cook, signed an affidavit saying ''he
had concocted his tale regarding Frank's failure to eat lunch the day of the
crime and subsequent hasty departure from home.'' McKnight claimed he had made up
this story, Oney wrote, ''at the behest of his employers at Beck & Gregg Hardware
who like so many others had been angling for the reward's offered in the
slaying's aftermath.'' Nina Formby contacted The New York Times to claim
that she had made up the story of Frank's wanting to rent a room under police
pressure. Finally, George Epps claimed police had pressured him into his
statement about Mary's fear of Frank.
The hair evidence and the raft of recantations
led The Atlanta Journal to run an editorial calling for a new trial.
To add to the confusion, McKnight, Formby and
Epps all soon recanted their recantations. Without explaining why they had made
the first recantations, they each insisted their testimony against Frank had
been accurate.
Frank's defenders found ammunition in a fresh
examination of the notes. Dinnerstein recorded that attorney Henry Alexander
''showed that these notes were written on the carbons of old order pads which had
been used previously by a former factory official. The dateline read 190-,''
indicating that the forms must have been at least four years old. The official
who signed the orders left the employ of the factory in 1912, and all his office
records, including pads, had been removed to the basement, near where Mary
Phagan's body had been found. Alexander concluded that this proved that Conley
could not have written the notes on a pad which Frank had given him in his
office.''
Alexander also believed that a phrase in one of
the notes pointed to their author. That phrase was ''night witch,'' previously
assumed by investigators to be a misspelling of ''night watch.'' Alexander
believed it meant exactly what it said because the ''night witch'' was a character
in Southern African-American folk belief, a witch who strangled children to
death. Alexander believed it improbable that Frank, a Northern Jew, would be
familiar with this belief and certain that Conley would be.
Judge Roan rejected Frank's first appeal.
However, he wrote, ''I have thought about this case more than any other I have
tried. I am not certain of the man's guilt. With all the thought I have put on
this case, I am not thoroughly convinced that Frank is guilty or innocent. The
jury was convinced. . . . I feel it is my duty to order that the motion for a
new trial be overruled.''
A month and a half later, Frank's attorneys
went before the Georgia Supreme Court. They argued that the prejudicial
atmosphere precluded a fair trial. The court rejected their appeal.
Frank got a new defense team, made up of
Herbert and Leonard Haas (brothers), Henry Alexander and the firm of Tye,
Peeples, and Jordan. They made errors attributed to Frank's trial attorneys,
Rosser and Arnold, the basis of an appeal. In Jordan's words, they claimed that
''Rosser and Arnold did not have the right to waive Frank's presence in the
courtroom when the jury returned their verdict.'' U.S. Supreme Court Justice
Oliver Wendall Holmes denied the appeal but added that there was doubt about the
fairness of Frank's trial because of ''the presence of a hostile demonstration
and seemingly dangerous crowd, thought by the presiding judge to be ready for
violence unless a verdict of guilty was rendered.''
According to Jordan, ''In February of 1915,
Frank's attorneys were given one more chance to be heard by the U. S. Supreme
Court, this time petitioning for a writ of habeas corpus.'' It was denied.
Frank's supporters believed his only chance was
a commutation. They received unexpected support in that effort from Conley's
attorney.
Smith, Conley's attorney, announced on October
2, 1914, that he believed his client killed Mary Phagan. Smith claimed he did
not act unethically in implicating his own client since Conley, convicted after
Frank's trial as an accessory, could not be tried again because of the
constitutional protection against double jeopardy. Smith added that he felt
compelled to speak out because the life of an innocent man was in danger.
While Frank garnered support, his case also
became a cause that lined up prominent people up against him. One of the most
notable of these was Tom Watson, who had started his career as a Populist with
relatively liberal racial views. Unfortunately, by the time of the Frank affair,
he had curdled into an extremist frequently denouncing African-Americans and
Roman Catholics. Still seen as a champion by poor white Protestants, he
published a weekly, The Jeffersonian, and a monthly,
Watson's Magazine.
In The Jeffersonian Watson ran a lengthy
editorial called ''The Frank Case: When and Where Shall Rich Criminals Be Tried?''
He also posed the question: ''Does a Jew expect extraordinary favors and
immunities because of his race?''
Frank's supporters looked to Gov. John Slaton
for a commutation. Slaton made a painstaking study of the evidence. He was under
a great deal of tension since, as Dinnerstein wrote, ''the governor was bombarded
with pleas for commutation or demands that the prisoner hang. More than a
thousand of the petitioners threatened to kill Slaton, and his wife, if he let
Frank live.''
Early on the morning of June 21, he told his
wife that he had decided to commute Frank's sentence to life in prison. He
admitted he feared for his life. According to Jordan, his wife told him, ''I
would rather be the widow of a brave and honorable man than the wife of a
coward.''
Knowing the decision could provoke violence,
Gov. Slaton directed officials to transport Frank from Atlanta's Fulton County
jail to the state prison at Milledgeville over 100 miles away.
Then Slaton made his decision public. In it he
said he had grave doubts about Frank's guilt. One factor in his decision was the
probability that Mary had been shoved down the chute rather than transported in
the elevator as Conley asserted. Here Slaton referred to a ''disagreeable''
matter, that of the feces at the bottom of the elevator shaft.
The mystery in the case is the question of
how Mary Phagan's body got into the basement. . . . Conley testified that on
the morning of April 26 he went down into the basement to relieve his bowels
and utilized the elevator shaft for the purpose.
On the morning of April 27 at 3 o'clock
when the detectives came down into the basement by way of the ladder, they
inspected the premises, including the shaft, and they found there human
excrement in natural condition.
Subsequently, when they used the elevator,
which everybody, including Conley, who had run the elevator for 1 1/2 years
admits only stops by hitting the ground in the basement, the elevator struck
the excrement and mashed it, thus demonstrating that the elevator had not
been used since Conley had been there.'' The governor noted other evidence
tending to point toward Conley's guilt rather than Frank's including, as
Jordan recorded, ''the fact that the notes were written on outdated pads
normally kept in the basement and not in Leo Frank's office.
The governor was applauded by some newspapers
and burned in effigy by those outraged. In Marietta, a town outside Atlanta, the
effigy bore a sign reading ''John M. Slaton, King of the Jews and Georgia's
Traitor Forever.''
In The Jeffersonian, Tom Watson blasted
the decision, writing, ''. . . let no man reproach the South with Lynch law: Let
him remember the unendurable provocation: and let him say whether Lynch law is
not better than no law at all.''
The Lynching
''Less than two weeks after Slaton had commuted Leo Frank's sentence state
newspapers prominently featured the somber pilgrimage of saddened Georgians to
the unveiling of Mary Phagan's monument. . . A group of 150 men, who called
themselves the Knights of Mary Phagan, then met secretly near her grave, and
pledged to avenge the little girl's death,'' Dinnerstein wrote.
On the night of July 18, 1915, a prisoner named
William Creen slashed the sleeping Frank's throat. Two other prisoners, both
doctors, managed to clamp the jugular vein. Frank was taken to the prison
hospital and his wound stitched. According to Dinnerstein, when Frank was
conscious he said, ''I am going to live. I must live. I must vindicate myself.''
One month later, on Aug. 16, a mob of about 25
men stormed the Milledgeville prison. They overpowered the two guards on duty,
then went to the hospital room where Frank was recovering. The intruders
handcuffed Frank and ushered him into the back seat of a waiting car with two
men on either side of him. The kidnappers tried to persuade Frank to confess,
even offering to spare his life if he did so. The prisoner adamantly denied the
crime. According to Dinnerstein, ''he sounded so sincere that two of his
listeners thought that perhaps he really had not murdered Mary Phagan, and that
he should be returned to the prison farm.''
The doubters were overruled. When they got to a
wooded area on the outskirts of Marietta, they led Frank to an oak tree. Jordan
wrote, ''Frank was asked if he wanted to make a statement. He said no. He removed
his wedding ring from his finger, handed it to one of his abductors and asked
that it be given to a newspaperman who would forward the ring to his wife. The
request was granted, and the ring eventually was returned to Mrs. Frank.''
A rope was wrapped around his neck, then flung
over and attached to a sturdy limb of the tree. Frank was forced to stand on a
table and the table was kicked out from under him.
The Rule of ''Lynch Law''
Lynching was common in the American West before
formal legal institutions became established. As The Columbia Encyclopedia
noted, ''Pioneers formed vigilance committees to repress crimes.''
The South was the other major area for ''lynch
law.'' Lynching was not always associated with racism but the very word would
eventually conjure up the image of an accused African-American strung up by an
angry, white Southern mob. According to the Encyclopedia Americana, ''The
antebellum South was known as the land of lynching before prejudice against
black people became a major factor. Of the more than 300 persons hanged or
burned by mobs between 1840 and 1860, fewer than 10% were black.'' However,
protecting the slave system was often at issue as mobs set upon white
abolitionists for aiding escaping black slaves.
After the defeat of the South in the Civil War,
lynching focused more heavily on black victims. ''There are 2805 [documented]
victims of lynch mobs killed between 1882 and 1930 in 10 southern states,
according to Stewart E. Tolnay and E.M. Beck,
A
Festival of Violence: An Analysis of Southern Lynchings, 1882-1930.
''Although mobs murdered almost
300 white men and women, the vast majority almost 2,500 of lynch victims
were African-American. Of these black victims, 94 percent died in the hands of
white lynch mobs. The scale of this carnage means that, on the average, a black
man, woman, or child was murdered nearly once a week, every week, between 1882
and 1930 by a hate-driven white mob.''
As The Columbia Encyclopedia noted,
lynching was used ''to intimidate blacks into political, social, and economic
submission.'' Contrary to white supremacist myth and widespread perception, most
lynched blacks had not been accused of raping or attempting to rape a white
woman; that allegation was at issue in only one-quarter of cases in which black
men were lynched. Blacks were lynched for a variety of offenses ranging from
common crimes to actions that were ''crimes'' only according to white supremacist
ideology such as ''insulting'' a white person or registering to vote.
The Leo Frank case was also exceptional,
perhaps even unique, in that the victim was a white man lynched for a crime
almost certainly committed by a black. However, according to Robert L.
Zangrando's segment of ''About Lynching,'' victims included ''Native Americans,
Latinos, Jews, Asian immigrants, and European newcomers.'' Lynching targets were
also ''labor union organizers, political radicals, critics of America's role in
World War I, and civil rights advocates.''
An anti-lynching movement had started almost a
quarter of a century before a mob took Leo Frank to a tree in Marietta. Its
primary leader was African-American journalist Ida B. Wells-Barnett. She
published a series of newspaper columns decrying the injustice of lynching and,
in 1892, an influential pamphlet called Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All
Its Phases. Groups like the National Association for the Advancement of
Colored People worked to fight lynching through both education and legal action.
In the 1920s and 1930s, many white women,
offended by the defense of lynching as necessary to ''protect'' them, became
prominent in the anti-lynching movement. According to Dickson D. Bruce, Jr. in ''Antilynching
Campaign,'' they ''worked to create a climate of opinion among white southerners
that would lead to lynching's demise.'' The practice began to die off in the
1940s.
Aftermath
Much of the Georgia public believed justice had
been served by Frank's lynching. The local Marietta newspaper proclaimed: 'We
regard the hanging of Leo M. Frank in Cobb County as an act of law abiding
citizens.'''
No one was ever charged with a crime in
connection with the lynching. Dinnerstein quoted the Greensboro, Ga.,
Herald-Journal as saying that ''the lynchers could confess, publish their
confession in the Atlanta papers, and they would never be molested.'' While Tom
Watson and many other prominent Georgians praised the lynching, there were also
voices raised in condemnation. The Atlanta Constitution called it
''Georgia's Shame!'' and wrote, ''No word in the language is too strong to apply to
the deliberate and carefully conspired deed of the mob.''
Gov. Slaton never held another elected public
office. By contrast, Jordan wrote, ''In 1916 Hugh Dorsey was elected governor of
Georgia riding the coattails of his popularity over the prosecution of Leo Frank
and with the substantial endorsement of Tom Watson.'' Dorsey was re-elected in
1918. During that term, he broke ranks with Watson by criticizing Georgia's
treatment of African-Americans. The two of them ran against each other for a U.
S. Senate seat. Watson won by a wide margin and died in office in 1922.
Lucile Frank lived for several more decades but
never remarried. In 1916, she left Atlanta for Tennessee when a brother-in-law
offered her a job in a women's clothing shop. In the 1920s, she returned to
Atlanta where she worked at the glove counter managed by her brother-in-law at a
J.P. Allen clothing store.
Although she functioned outwardly, those close
to her believed she never stopped mourning her husband. An internist who treated
her, Dr. James Kauffman, said, ''She somatized [made physical] her complaints.
She had chest pains, headaches. When I think of her, I think of depression. Leo
may have been killed but she served a life sentence.'' She signed her name ''Mrs.
Leo Frank'' until her death in 1957. Among her affects were the wedding ring a
doomed Leo had asked to be returned to her and letters Lucile had written to her
husband several of them penned after his death.
After serving a year on a chain gang for his
confessed crime of accessory after the fact for helping to move Mary Phagan's
body, Jim Conley was released. He had more scrapes with the law for offenses
ranging from public intoxication to burglary and died in 1962.
B'nai B'rith established the Anti-Defamation
League shortly after Frank's trial. Frank's trial was one of the factors leading
to the formation of this organization but by no means the sole cause.
After Frank's death, the Knights of Mary Phagan
served as the launching pad for the resurrected Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, an
organization that had been dormant since its Reconstruction heyday. According to
''The Leo Frank Case'' compiled by Charles Pou, ''It must be noted that the Phagan
family has not condoned Klan activity, especially in regards to Mary. In fact
the family expressly forbade a Klan request to hold a ceremony at Mary Phagan's
gravesite.''
Pou recorded that on March 11, 1986, ''the
Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles finally issued a posthumous pardon to Leo
Frank, based on the state's failure to protect him while in custody; it did not
officially absolve him of the crime.''
Jordan wrote, ''On the 80th
anniversary of the lynching of Leo Frank, Rabbi Steven Lebow had a plaque placed
on an office building near the intersection of Roswell and Frey's Gin roads at
the site where Frank was hanged. It reads, 'Wrongly accused. Falsely convicted.
Wantonly murdered.'''
Almost a century after her death, people have
still not forgotten ''the little factory girl'' who went to pick up her pay and
never returned home. According to Joan Ellars, executive director of Keep
Marietta Beautiful that oversees the Marietta City Cemetery at which she is
buried, they still visit Mary Phagan's grave and leave gifts of toys and model
angels.
