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The Leo Frank Case: The Lynching of a Guilty Man

NOI Historical Research Dept.

$29.95

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

One of the most sensational criminal cases of twentieth century America was the brutal murder in August 1913 of Mary Phagan, a teenage white female factory worker in Atlanta, Georgia.

At the conclusion of a widely publicized trial, the factory’s Jewish manager was found guilty of the crime and sentenced to death. After the Georgia governor commuted the sentence to life imprisonment, a group a citizens seized Leo Frank from prison and hanged him. Sexual coercion, racial bigotry, planted evidence, apparent rape, Jewish community pressure, and alleged anti-Jewish prejudice all figured prominently in the dramatic murder trial, which generated nationwide attention.

This book is a detailed 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, this book convincingly establishes that Leo Frank murdered Mary Phagan.

When Atlanta police learned of the murder of 13-year-old victim, they first suspected that a black man who worked as a night watchman at the factory had committed the crime. But soon the evidence persuaded the police that the actual killer was most likely Leo Frank, a prominent figure in the city’s influential and wealthy Jewish community.

Important Jewish leaders in business and public life mounted a large-scale campaign to free Frank. His lawyers hired two private detective agencies to find evidence that might help their defendant. But both agencies concluded that Frank was indeed guilty of the crime. Influential Jewish leaders who rallied to Frank’s defense admitted in private their contempt for Frank’s personality, and acknowledged that he was probably guilty.

A high point in the sensational and nationally publicized trial was the testimony of a black man, Jim Conley, who Frank’s lawyers claimed was the murderer. During the trial, Frank’s lawyers appealed to and tried to inflame anti-black sentiment among the twelve white men who served as jurors in the case, claiming that only a “nigger” could have committed the crime. 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 or the arguments made by his legal team. Leo Frank was the first white man in the South to be convicted of a capital crime in a trial that prominently featured the testimony of black witnesses. That fact alone made this an extraordinary case.

The day before Frank was scheduled to hang, the state’s governor commuted Frank’s death sentence to life imprisonment. Eight weeks later, a group of enraged citizens took Frank from prison, drove him to the murdered girl’s hometown, and hanged him from a tree.

In the years since, Jewish organizations have insisted that Frank was the innocent victim of anti-Jewish bigotry. These efforts have been effective. The mainstream media routinely promotes the claim that Leo Frank was an innocent victim of anti-Jewish hatred. The “Anti-Defamation League,” perhaps the most influential Jewish advocacy group in the US, has for years been especially active in promoting the claim that the conviction and lynching of Frank were emblematic of virulent anti-Semitism in America. In 2015, on the one-hundredth anniversary of the lynching, the ADL national director announced an important new initiative against anti-Semitism, repeatedly invoking the name of Leo Frank.

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