The Lynching of Leo Frank

Leo Frank was a fairly uninteresting character, born in Texas, in 1884. He was raised in Brooklyn, New York, and lived a usual life in a Jewish family. He held jobs in Massachusetts and New York before his uncle invited him to help found the National Pencil Company in Georgia. He married into an affluent Jewish family in Georgia, and gained some recognition in the small Jewish community there. Otherwise he was a fairly obscure individual until his trial.

Early in the morning of April 27, 1913, the night watchman at the National Pencil Factory in Atlanta, Georgia stumbled upon the body of Mary Phagan in the basement of the factory. Mary, 13 years old, had been an employee of the factory to help support her widowed mother and siblings. When the night watchman discovered her, it was plain that she had been raped and brutally murdered. With her body was a note, incriminating an unnamed Negro. Leo Frank was called in to identify the body, and he was shocked to discover that the girl had been in his office only the day before, to collect her pay. Because of this, and because of the animosity of the south towards northerners, Leo Frank, was easily made a suspect. He, along with the night watchman, were arrested and brought to trial.

Though his wife maintained his innocence, a trial was brought up against him, mostly with circumstantial evidence. The attitude of the Georgians against this northerner was hostile, and the media did nothing to help. Newspapers around the south sensationalized the case, painting a picture of Frank, not as a mild and nervous man, but instead as a pedophile and homosexual, indulging his twisted appetites by preying on his own factory girls. Blood and hair were procured from the factory that were deemed to have come from the victim, and witnesses were brought to testify that Frank's alibi was false. However, the star witness was a man named Jim Conley, a petty thief and janitor of the pencil factory. He admitted that he had written the notes found with Mary Phagan's body. He claimed that Frank had murdered the girl, dictated the notes to him, and made him help carry the girl's body to the basement. His claim upheld the media's story of a twisted, pedophilic Frank, who murdered Mary Phagan because she would not consent to "play" with her employer.

Ultimately, Leo Frank was found guilty of the crime and sentenced to hang. The jury was overwhelmingly against him, though his judge eventually recanted and supported an appeal for his innocence. Over the next two years, appeals were made in an effort to spare his life, if not clear his name. The governor of Georgia, also a believer in Frank's innocence, eventually commuted his sentence to life in prison, with the hopes that in time, his innocence could be indisputably proven. However, on August 16, 1915, a lynch mob overpowered the guards at the prison where Frank was being held, and drove him to an oak grove in Marietta, seven hours away. The mob urged Frank to confess his crime and repent, however Frank maintained his innocence to the bitter end. They hanged him there, and left his body in the tree, where crowds of people gathered to see the spectacle. As a curious twist of events, however, they did honor Leo Frank's last wish, and returned his wedding ring to his grieving wife. Also interesting is the fact that the state of Georgia only pardoned Leo Frank in the 1980's, 75 years after his lynching.

The musical Parade was written in the late 1990's, a dramatic reworking of the murder of Mary Phagan. It ran on Broadway to only meager successes, and ultimately survives only in print and as an original cast recording.

Works Consulted

TruTV Crime Library. Online. March 4, 2008. http://www.crimelibrary.com/notorious_murders/not_guilty/frank/1.html

Jewish Virtual library. Online. March 4, 2008. http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/anti-semitism/frank.html