An innocent factory manager's 1913 conviction gave rise to the Anti-Defamation League
Leo Frank, a Jewish pencil-factory superintendent in Atlanta, was convicted in 1913 of murdering a 13-year-old employee, Mary Phagan. Researchers today agree he was innocent. After the governor spared his life, a mob seized him from prison, and the case helped spur both the Anti-Defamation League and a revived Ku Klux Klan.
Frank was born in Cuero, Texas, in 1884 and grew up in Brooklyn. After Pratt Institute he studied mechanical engineering at Cornell, graduating in 1906. His uncle Moses, a major shareholder in Atlanta's National Pencil Company, recruited him; Frank spent nine months learning the trade at the Eberhard Faber works in Germany, and in 1908 became superintendent at $180 a month plus a share of profits. He married Lucille Selig in 1910 and in 1912 was elected president of Atlanta's B'nai B'rith chapter.
The city was in upheaval. Rural migrants were pouring in for factory work, many men resented women taking industrial jobs, and at a child labour conference in April 1913 some speakers blamed Jewish factory owners. Rabbi David Marx, a leading figure for half a century, worried that tension between long-settled German Jews and recent Russian immigrants would feed antisemitism. The historian Leonard Dinnerstein describes the girl's death that year as setting off mass hysteria and prejudice.
Phagan was killed at the factory in April 1913. Frank was indicted in May and tried at Fulton County Superior Court from late July. The prosecution leaned on Jim Conley, a Black factory worker who admitted helping after the crime; the defence argued Conley was the real killer, as many historians now think, but its portrayal of him was condemned as virulently racist. Frank was found guilty on August 25. His appeals ran out at the US Supreme Court in April 1915, and Governor John M. Slaton, weighing evidence unavailable at trial, commuted the death sentence to life.
National newspapers called the verdict a travesty, criticism that inflamed feeling in Georgia. In August 1915 armed men abducted Frank and killed him near Marietta, Phagan's hometown; prominent locals took part, yet nobody was ever charged. In 1986 Georgia's pardons board granted a pardon acknowledging the state's failure to protect him, without ruling on guilt.
Source: Leo Frank
