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.
The Emory Wheel was founded in 1919 and is currently the only independent, student-run newspaper of Emory University. The Wheel publishes weekly on Wednesdays during the academic year, except during University holidays and scheduled publication intermissions.
The Wheel is financially and editorially independent from the University. All of its content is generated by the Wheel’s more than 100 student staff members and contributing writers, and its printing costs are covered by profits from self-generated advertising sales.
Emory let the German department deny Erik Butler tenure solely because he was Jewish (the EEOC investigated and agrees). The head of the German department actually told Dr. Butler that his research focused too much on Jewish issues and that was bad. I knew Erik Butler. I knew about all of this stuff before he was fired. Yet when he was fired, there were no large protests in his defense. This man was a one of a kind genius, and a great asset to any University that employed him. But Emory let the German fire and defame him for discriminatory reasons, causing him great mental anguish. And they probably allowed this to happen without proper due process, because they wanted to cut back on liberal arts professors anyways. President Wagner wrote a column that was poorly worded and supposedly offended black people and all hell breaks loose. Ron Sauder approved that article that Wagner wrote and he was quoted as saying that there was no way Dr. Butler was discriminated against. But Ron Sauder is obviously a moron, if his job is marketing a University and he gave that article the go-ahead to be published.
Jwags = Gaywags
No,
Jwags = Jfags
The pardon of Leo Frank did not exonerate him of murdering Mary Phagan, it simply restored to Leo Frank his civil rights to vote and participate on juries, but according to every level of the United States legal system, Leo Frank is still officially guilty and his guilt has never been overturned.
Now that the Leo Frank trial brief of Evidence, is available on the Internet for the public to read, everyone now knows that Leo Frank confessed to the murder of Mary Phagan four separate and distinct times.
This is the ineluctable final word on the Leo Frank Case:
Leo Frank Trial Transcript, August 18, 1913:
“Now, gentlemen [of the jury], to the best of my recollection from the time the whistle blew for twelve o’clock [noon] until after a quarter to one [12:45 pm] when I went up stairs [to the fourth floor] and spoke to Arthur White and Harry Denham, to the best of my recollection, I did not stir out of the inner office [located at the front of the second floor]; but it is possible that in order to answer a call of nature or to urinate I may have gone to the toilet [in the metal room at the back of the second floor]. Those are things that a man does unconsciously and cannot tell how many times nor when he does it.” (Leo Frank Trial Brief of Evidence, 1913, page 186)
When you’re ready to learn what really happened, read the Leo Frank Trial Brief of Evidence (1913) and Leo Frank Case Georgia Supreme Court Records (1913, 1914). The best book on the Leo Frank Case and the murder of Mary Phagan was written by Mary Phagan Kean.
Leo Frank’s pardon, notwithstanding its wording, still does exonerate him for the murder of Mary Phagan–TACITLY. And it renders his illegitimate murder conviction irrevocably NULL AND VOID! NEVER believe anything that comes from leofrank.org; it is a virulently anti-Semitic website thoroughly saturated with crude bigotry, lies and half-truths! On the contrary, the best book on the Leo Frank case is AND THE DEAD SHALL RISE, by Steve Oney. And read my essay WHY THE LEO FRANK PARDON IS IMPORTANT, available online at http://www.jashp.org and from most online search engines.