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Leo Frank, United States

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Cypress Avenue & Cypress Hills Street & Jackie Robinson Parkway
Glendale
NY 11385
USA

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Leo Max Frank (April 17, 1884 – August 17, 1915) was a Jewish-American factory superintendent whose murder trial and extrajudicial hanging in 1915 by a lynch mob planned and led by prominent citizens in Marietta, Georgia, drew attention to questions of antisemitism in the United States. Frank was posthumously pardoned in 1986, which the Georgia State Board of Pardons and Paroles described as "an effort to heal old wounds," without officially absolving him of the crime.
An engineer and director of the National Pencil Company in Atlanta, Frank was convicted on August 25, 1913, for murdering one of his factory employees, 13-year-old Mary Phagan. She had been strangled on April 26 and was found dead in the factory cellar the next morning. A state physician who conducted the autopsy reported evidence of sexual violence. Frank was the last person known to have seen her alive, and there were allegations that he had sexually harassed her in the past. His criminal case became the focus of powerful class, regional, and political interests. Raised in New York, he was cast as a carpetbagging representative of Yankee capitalism, a bourgeoisie northern Jew in contrast to the poverty experienced by child laborers like Phagan and many working-class adult Southerners of the time, as the agrarian South was undergoing the throes of industrialization. During trial proceedings, Frank and his lawyers resorted to racial stereotypes, accusing another suspect, James Conley – a Black factory worker and admitted accomplice, who testified against Frank — of being especially disposed to lying and murdering because of his ethnicity. There was jubilation in the streets when Frank was convicted and sentenced to capital punishment by way of hanging.
Newspaper coverage began with the report of the murder's discovery, and continued nearly unabated throughout the investigation, trial, and appeals process. Initially a local story, competition between Atlanta newspapers was fierce. This competition resulted in exceptional examples of sensationalist reporting and yellow journalism. After Frank's conviction, and during his legal appeals, interest in the case was championed by wealthy and influential individuals such as Adolph Ochs, owner of The New York Times, and others, who gave the story anti-Southern and pro-Frank national coverage. Resentment in Atlanta grew heated as the perception of northern interference in Georgia legal affairs intensified. One year after the trial, influential Georgian populist and former U.S. Representative Thomas E. Watson began fighting back in his own publications, The Jeffersonian and Watson's Magazine, with vitriolic attacks on those who sought to overturn Frank's conviction. Watson attacked Frank as a sodomite and member of the Jewish aristocracy who had pursued "Our Little Girl" to a hideous death.
By April 1915, Frank's appeals had failed. Governor John M. Slaton – law partner of Frank's lead trial defense attorney – stating that guilt had not been proven with absolute certainty, commuted Frank's death sentence to life imprisonment, causing state-wide outrage. A crowd of 1,200 marched on Slaton's residence at the Governor's Mansion in protest.
Less than four weeks later, Frank narrowly survived a prison attack in which his throat was slashed. Thereafter he remained in the prison infirmary one month, when he was kidnapped from the penitentiary by a group of 25 armed men who called themselves "Knights of Mary Phagan". Frank was driven 170 miles from Milledgeville to Frey's Gin, near Phagan's former home in Marietta, and lynched. A crowd gathered after the hanging and photographs were made that were turned into postcards. After Frank was cut down, bits of the hangman's noose were taken as souvenirs and one gawker stomped on Frank's face.

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