August 17, 2005 marked the 90th anniversary of the lynching of Leo Frank by an anti-Semitic mob in Marietta, Georgia. In 1913 Frank was arrested, tried and convicted of murder, but the results of the trial, and subsequent lynching remain tangible reminders of what America was like in the not too long ago. A New York native, Leo Frank was a manager for the National Pencil Company of Atlanta, Georgia when he was falsely accused of murdering a 14-year-old employee, Mary Phagan.
The murder of Mary Phagan was the catalyst for one of the most virulent anti-Semitic episodes in American history. Frank, a northern Jew, was arrested, indicted and tried for Phagan's murder without evidence. His trial was a spectacle; threats, intimidation, and a boisterous crowd outside chanting "kill the Jew" and "hang the Jew" could easily be heard through the courtroom's open windows. When all was said and done, Leo Frank was condemned to death by hanging.
After the Georgia appellate courts and the U.S. Supreme Court rejected numerous appeals, the Governor of Georgia commuted Frank's sentence to life imprisonment, sparking riots in Atlanta. The "Jeffersonian", a racist weekly newspaper, urged that Frank not be allowed to escape "justice". That same month, Frank's throat was slashed by a fellow inmate.
Less then a month after he survived the assassination attempt, Leo Frank was abducted from prison by a group of 30 men, calling themselves the Knights of Mary Phagan. The mob drove Frank to Marietta, Georgia, Mary Phagan's hometown, and lynched him from an oak tree. Leo Frank remains the only Jewish person ever to be lynched in the United States.
The lessons of the Frank case are as clear today as they were 90 years ago; the diversity that makes America unique is too often used as a scapegoat in difficult times. The violence and intimidation against minorities that was responsible for Frank's murder is still a modern concern as we were reminded with the horrific racist murder of James Byrd Jr. in Texas, the homophobic murder of Matthew Shepard in Wyoming, the bias-motivated murder of Yankel Rosenbaum in Crown Heights, and after the September 11th, 2001 terror attacks against the U.S., with a series of violent attacks against people of Muslim, Arab and Sikh backgrounds. Leo Frank's story is a cry for acceptance. Too often people are quick to blame the "outsider" and violent hate crimes are too often the result.
It was through ADL's campaign to exonerate Frank that The Georgia State Board of Pardons and Paroles officially pardoned him on March 11, 1986, 73 years after his conviction.
Leo Frank was buried in Mount Carmel Cemetery, Ridgewood, New York. ADL unveiled a memorial to Leo Frank in tribute to the 90th anniversary of his trial on October 20, 2003.
