Lynching of Leo Frank
In 1913, a Jew in Atlanta named Leo Frank was convicted for the rape and murder of Mary Phagan, a 13-year-old Christian girl in his employ. Frank was sentenced to death but Governor Slaton, convinced by a review of the evidence that Frank was innocent, commuted the sentence to life imprisonment. As a result of public outrage over this act, a Georgia mob kidnapped Frank from prison and lynched him.
In response to the lynching of Leo Frank, Sigmund Livingston founded the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) under the sponsorship of B'nai B'rith. The ADL became the leading Jewish group fighting anti-Semitism in the United States. The lynching of Leo Frank coincided with and helped spark the revival of the Ku Klux Klan. The Klan disseminated the view that anarchists, communists and Jews were subverting American values and ideals.
Read more about this topic: Jewish American History
Famous quotes containing the words lynching, leo and/or frank:
“No reporter of my generation, whatever his genius, ever really rated spats and a walking stick until he had covered both a lynching and a revolution.”
—H.L. (Henry Lewis)
“Leo: What was she, a TV groupie? A hooker?
Rob: No, she was not a TV groupie, or a hooker. She’s a cellist. A very funny, pretty, interesting, intelligent, fabulous, vivacious cellist.
Leo: Oh yeah, well, you’d better not see her again.”
—Jonathan Reynolds, screenwriter. Leo (Richard Mulligan)
“... in spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can’t build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death. I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness, I hear the ever approaching thunder, which will destroy us too, I can feel the sufferings of millions and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think that it will all come right, that this cruelty too will end, and that peace and tranquillity will return again.”
—Anne Frank (1929–1945)