One hundred years ago this April began a series of events culminating in one of the most notorious anti-Semitic incidents in American history.
It would end two years later when a Jew was lynched in Atlanta.
In a class I taught in the history department two years ago, I asked students if they were familiar with Leo Frank. Not a single hand went up.
An appalling sign of ignorance of our own city's past?
Or was the Leo Frank incident such an aberration from the welcome that Jews have found in the American mainstream that it hardly registers today?
Perhaps both.
In April 1913, an Atlanta pencil factory superintendent named Leo Frank was arrested for the murder of 13-year-old Mary Phagan, who worked in the factory.
After a trial that in retrospect (and even to many sympathetic observers at the time) reeked of intimidation and injustice, Frank was sentenced to death; Georgia Governor John M. Slaton commuted Frank's sentence in 1915 to life in prison.
Members of Phagan's community in Marietta could not abide such a decision; they broke Frank out of jail and lynched him on Aug. 17, 1915 (for those with steel stomachs, the image of a hanging Frank is widely available).
The Leo Frank case – the terminology here is a bit fuzzy: episode? affair? "case"? – left us two legacies in the South and in the nation more broadly. The first was the creation of the Anti-Defamation League, which started as a Jewish defense organization but evolved in the post-WWII years to combat other forms of discrimination. The other was the revival of the Ku Klux Klan.
And yet, as I found in my class, Leo Frank's story has not fared well in our collective consciousness. On the centenary of this heinous incident, perhaps the time is right for us – as Americans and Atlantans – to use this occasion to raise questions about our country, our region, our city and our community.
Leo Frank was just one example of what we might consider "southern justice," a system of punishment we today easily identify as extra-legal, but those who lived through it had to receive the imprimatur of the state. One needs only to flip through a history textbook, or the pages of today's newspapers, to find legion examples of victims of the system of southern justice.
Emory's past is, like many universities, complicated.
The University has taken important steps to confront its troubled history, and its efforts to come to terms with its slave-holding and anti-Semitic past have deservedly garnered national attention.
Also to Emory's credit, the Transforming Community Project's Community Dialogue program has featured the Frank story, as well as other less sanguine aspects of the University's origins and history, as part of its curriculum.
But there is still work to be done. The Tam Institute for Jewish Studies, with a grant from the American Academy for Jewish Research, is planning a series of events to begin discussion about this important topic.
On Monday, April 15, University of Michigan historian Karla Goldman will present the Rabbi Jacob M. Rothschild Memorial Seminar on the topic of "Jewish Women's Organizations and the Challenge of Race Relations in Atlanta and Beyond." Also, Emory and the Breman Jewish Heritage Museum have partnered to host a lecture by New York University historian Hasia Diner on April 30.
My students were torn, as I have long been, about the coda to Leo Frank's story: in 1986, the Georgia State Board of Pardons and Paroles pardoned Frank for the crime against Mary Phagan, a symbolic but still important gesture.
As we (re)consider our past, confront the issues of the present and contemplate the challenges of the future, let us use this month to reflect on the legacy of injustice, racism and violence in our city and our country.
Although the Frank case may seem like a remote relic from another time and place, it is more recent and close-to-home than we care to imagine. And let us use the Leo Frank case to inspire us to reflect, to question and to do better.
If not now, when?
Jason Schulman is a graduate student in the History Department.
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