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The Leo Frank Case: The Lynching of a Guilty Man

NOI Historical Research Dept.

$27.95

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Softcover book. 536 pages
ISBN: 9780963687784
Stock Number: 0521

One of the most sensational and enduringly significant criminal cases of twentieth century America was the brutal murder in August 1913 of Mary Phagan, a 13-year-old white factory worker in Atlanta, Georgia. Sexual coercion, racial bigotry, planted evidence, violence, Jewish community pressure, and alleged anti-Jewish prejudice all figured in the dramatic murder trial, which generated nationwide attention.

At the conclusion of the trial, the jury found Leo Frank, the victim’s boss at the factory, guilty of the crime. He was sentenced to death. But shortly before his execution, the state’s governor commuted the sentence to life imprisonment. Eight weeks later, a group of enraged citizens took Frank from prison, drove him to the murdered girl’s home town, and hanged him from a tree.

For more than a century, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and other influential Zionist organizations, with support from the mainstream media and Hollywood, have claimed that Frank – a prominent figure in the Atlanta Jewish community – was an innocent victim of anti-Jewish bigotry.

This book is an impressively researched examination of a fascinating and historically important case. It thoroughly exposes the blatant anti-black racism of the defendant and his legal team, and reviews the major campaign organized by wealthy and influential Jewish community leaders in New York and other northern cities to exonerate Frank. This 536-page work is illustrated with maps, diagrams, and photographs, and is referenced with more than a thousand footnotes. For any open-minded person, it convincingly establishes that Leo Frank murdered Mary Phagan.

During the trial, Frank’s lawyers appealed to and tried to inflame anti-black sentiment among the twelve white men of the jury in an effort to pin the murder on Jim Conley, a black man who also worked at the factory. This book details the vicious racism of the defendant and his lawyers, who told the court that Conley was “a beastly, drunken, filthy, lying nigger,” “a cannibal, a man-eater,” a “stinking black brute,” and much more in that spirit.

Remarkably, the white jurors set aside the anti-black attitudes that prevailed in Southern society at the time, and instead concluded that the plain evidence, including the testimony of black witnesses, was more credible and convincing than the testimony of Frank and the arguments made by his legal team. Leo Frank was the first white man in the “Jim Crow” South to be convicted of a capital crime in a trial that prominently featured the testimony of black witnesses.

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