When a Jewish man was lynched for murdering a little girl, the Klan was reborn
But Leo Frank was innocent
On Thanksgiving night in 1915, Joseph Simmons and 15 men gathered at the peak of Stone Mountain, near Atlanta, Georgia. Their faces lit by a flaming cross, they declared that the Ku Klux Klan was back. Simmons, an Atlanta physician and self-proclaimed minister, envisioned this fraternal vigilante group as an order for elites, where wealthy white men would protect the honor of defenseless white women from a rising hoard of “others.” The Klan would be, according to Simmons, “A Classy Order of the Highest Class, No ‘Rough Necks,’ ‘Rowdies’ nor ‘Yellow Streaks.’… REAL MEN.”
According to Linda Gordon’s 2017 history of the 1920s Klan, The Second Coming, Simmons was inspired to bring the Klan back from 40 years of dormancy by one incident — the lynching of Leo Frank, a Jewish man who was accused (wrongly, it turned out) of murdering a 13-year-old white girl.
Up to that point, the Klan had concentrated its efforts on terrorizing African Americans; the extrajudicial murder of Frank is the first known anti-Semitic lynching in the country. The narrative was perfect for the Klan’s reawakening: A prosperous Jew had murdered a helpless little white girl, and wealthy white Georgians had brought him to justice. In the following years, the Klan’s numbers would swell to roughly four million as they transitioned from a fringe terrorist group focusing only on the “black threat” to a robust organization with a more expansive vision of hate that included not just blacks, but Jews, Catholics, immigrants, and communists, weaving this xenophobia into the fabric of American life.
Leo Frank was a Cornell graduate raised in New York. By age 29, he was the superintendent of an Atlanta pencil factory. According to The Dead Shall Rise, a history of the incident by Steve Oney, on April 26th, 1913, young Mary Phagan boarded a trolley bound for Atlanta. She had dropped out of school to help her family by working in Frank’s pencil factory, attaching erasers to the backs of the pencils for ten cents an hour.
That day, she never came out of the factory alive. Her body was found in the basement with a head wound, a cord around her neck, and a strange series of notes implicating a black man who worked in the factory. But when investigators arrived at the scene, they seized on Frank — the last man who admitted to having seen her alive. He was charged with Mary Phagan’s murder.
At this point, Atlanta was awash in anti-Semitism. Leading the charge against Frank was former populist vice presidential candidate turned media mogul Tom Watson, who stirred up anti-Semitism in his newspaper by portraying Frank as a greedy, lecherous Jew praying on white girls with his “Unlimited Money and Invisible Power.”
Other newspapers followed suit. One Louisiana paper struggled to recall other cases that had so fully captivated the Southern attention span. The broadsheets were covered with drawings of Mary Phagan’s face — a beautiful, demure girl with ribbons in her hair, the very essence of “youth and innocence” with “not the tiniest speck of wrongdoing upon her white hands,” as one paper noted. “Mary Phagan’s life was one of such beauty and purity,” the Atlanta Constitution read, and it had been ripped from her by a murderous Jew.
At the trial, a slew of women were brought to the witness stand. They reported that Frank was sometimes known to enter the women’s dressing room. Jim Conley, a black factory sweeper who was accused of the crime in the strange notes found at the scene, was brought as a witness. He argued that Frank had murdered Mary Phagan, was fond of little girls, and that he had helped him carry Phagan’s body to the basement. He said he had written the strange notes, essentially implicating himself at Frank’s request.
Frank’s lawyers used racism to defend their client from what they believed was a charge motivated by anti-Semitism — an irony apparently lost on them — arguing that Conley had done it. Conley, according to Frank’s legal team, was a “a plain, beastly, drunken, filthy, lying nigger” whose word should not be taken over a white man’s. The prosecution relied on racism as well, arguing that Conley, by virtue of his skin color and social status, was too stupid to have made up the story. The jury agreed.
Anti-Semitism in Atlanta had reached fever pitch during the trial, so Frank was kept out of the courtroom for his own safety when the verdict was read, in case he was found innocent. But the jury unanimously declared Frank guilty. He was sentenced to death. “Leo Frank Gets Death Sentence — Crowds Cheer,” the Atlanta Constitution read.
A friend of Frank’s was dispatched to his mother’s home to tell her, then to Frank’s jail cell, where the news was relayed to him and his wife. Frank remained composed, but his wife let out a cry of anguish. “Oh Leo!” she cried, “Can’t we get justice?”
The sentence was commuted to life after the Governor of Georgia, John Slaton, reviewed the evidence. “I would be a murderer if I allowed that man to hang,” he said. In response, a mob descended on Slaton’s home, which was had to be dispersed by a group of policemen and the national guard.
Watson, the politician turned media mogul who ran the smear campaign against Frank, called for Frank’s lynching. On the night of August 17, 1915, a group of wealthy and well-connected white men calling themselves “The Knights of Mary Phagan” arrived at the Milledgeville State Penitentiary. Likely with the help of the prison guards, they kidnapped Frank, handcuffed him, and drove to a farm in nearby Marietta.
Before stringing Frank from a tree, they allowed him to speak. With the rope around his neck, Frank said his final words: “I think more of my wife and my mother than I do of my own life.”
His death was slow. The drop hadn’t been long enough.
Some of the very same men who lynched Leo Frank went to Stone Mountain that Thanksgiving night a few months later to burn crosses and announce the second coming of the Klan.
Those who had succeeded in villainizing Frank prospered. The prosecutor at his trial became the governor of Georgia. Watson became a senator. It is now widely agreed that Conley committed Phagan’s murder — a strange twist considering that the Klan might have liked this outcome just as well. In fact, Conley’s own lawyer had insisted after the trial that he was guilty, and that Frank was innocent — a move which ended his career.
Frank was posthumously pardoned in 1986 on the grounds that the state hadn’t protected him from a mob, without any statement regarding his innocence, though it’s widely agreed that he was. In 2000, a list of the lynchers was published revealing numerous Atlanta elites.
Watch: In the 1920s, women formed their own branch of the KKK
