Leo Frank

Leo Max Frank (April 17, 1884 – August 17, 1915) was a Jewish-American factory superintendent whose hanging in 1915 by a lynch mob, planned and led by prominent citizens in Marietta, Georgia, drew attention to antisemitism in the United States.

An engineer and superintendent of the National Pencil Company in Atlanta, Frank was convicted on August 25, 1913, for the murder of one of his factory workers, 13-year-old Mary Phagan. She had been strangled on April 26, and was found dead in the factory cellar the next day. Frank was the last person known to have seen her alive, and there were allegations that he had flirted with her in the past. His trial became the focus of powerful class, regional and political interests. Raised in New York, he was cast as a representative of Yankee capitalism, a rich northern Jew lording it over vulnerable working women, as the historian Albert Lindemann put it. Former U.S. Representative Thomas E. Watson used the sensational coverage of the case in his own publications to push for a revival of the Ku Klux Klan, calling Frank a member of the Jewish aristocracy who had pursued "Our Little Girl" to a hideous death. Frank and his lawyers resorted to stereotypes too, accusing another suspect — Jim Conley, a black factory worker who testified against Frank — of being especially disposed to lying and murdering because of his race.

There was jubilation in the streets when Frank was convicted and sentenced to death. By June 1915 his appeals had failed, but Governor John M. Slaton believed there had been a miscarriage of justice, and commuted the sentence to life imprisonment—to great local outrage. A crowd of 1,200 marched on Slaton's home in protest, and two months later Frank was kidnapped from prison by a lynch mob of 25 armed men who called themselves "Knights of Mary Phagan". Frank was driven 150 miles to Frey's Gin, near Phagan's home in Marietta, and murdered. A crowd gathered after the hanging; one man repeatedly stomped on Frank's face, while others took photographs, pieces of his nightshirt, and bits of the rope to sell as souvenirs.

On March 11, 1986, the Georgia State Board of Pardons and Paroles granted Frank a pardon, citing the state's failure to protect him or prosecute his killers, though they stopped short of exonerating him. The names of Frank's murderers were well-known locally but were not made public until January 7, 2000, when Stephen Goldfarb, an Atlanta librarian and former history professor, published the Phagan-Kean list on his website. The Washington Post noted that the list includes several prominent citizens — a former governor, the son of a senator, a Methodist minister, a state legislator, and a former state Superior Court judge — their names matching those on Marietta's street signs, office buildings, shopping centers, and law offices today.