The Leo Frank case is one of the most notorious and highly publicized cases in the legal annals of Georgia. Essentially, a Jewish man in Atlanta by the name of Leo Frank, was placed on trial and convicted of raping and murdering a 13 year old work who worked for the National Pencil Company, which Mr. Frank managed. Prior to the lynching of Frank two years later, the case gained worldwide recognition and curiosity sparked the nation. The degree of anti-Semitism involved in Frank's conviction and subsequent lynching is arduous to assess, but it was enough of a factor to have inspired Jews, and others, throughout the country to protest the conviction of an innocent man.
On April 26, 1913, Mary Phagen, moved to Atlanta for financial gain and went to work in the pencil factory that Leo Frank managed. Frank is recorded as being the last individual to have seen Phagen alive prior to her death in which a factory watchman found her bruised and dead in the cellar. On the basis of this evidence Frank was arrested. The police thereafter collected more "evidence" before deciding to put Frank on trial. The state's main witness, Jim Conley, a black janitor who was arrested when he was seen washing red stains from a shirt, later gave at least four contradictory affidavits explaining how he had helped Frank dispose of the body. Based entirely on the testimony of the janitor, the jury convicted the defendant. Frank's attorneys were unable to break Conley's testimony on the stand. Atlantans hoped for a conviction. They surrounded the courthouse, cheered the prosecutor as he entered and exited the building each day, and celebrated wildly when the jurors, after twenty-five days of trial, found Frank guilty.
After all the court appeals had been exhausted, Frank's attorneys sought a commutation from Georgia governor, John M. Slaton. Slaton reviewed more than 10,000 pages of documents, frequently visited the pencil factory where the murder took place and concluded that Frank was in fact innocent.
Frank was interned at a prison farm for two months. During his internment, another prisoner slashed Frank's throat with a knife, thankfully Frank survived. However, on an August night in 1915, Jewish-American engineer Leo Frank was dragged from his jail cell and lynched, putting a cap on an infamous murder case that had inflamed the state of Georgia and captivated the entire country. The case attracted national press and many reporters deemed the conviction a travesty. Within Georgia, this outside criticism fueled antisemitism and hatred toward Frank. On August 16, 1915, he was kidnapped from prison by a group of armed men and lynched at Marietta, Mary Phagan's hometown, the next morning.
The discovery of the body of 13-year old Mary Phagen, in the basement of Atlanta based pencil factory was a story that shocked not only the south, but the entirety of the nation. It now seems, unfortunately, that the case was a result from the South's anti-Semitism that conspired to the conviction of the wrong man, the factory's Jewish superintendent, Leo Frank.
Historically, the Frank case has had extreme consequences throughout the past century. The lynching of Frank, an American Jew was perhaps one of the only lynching cases to be felt by the North and the South, and in both Jewish and non-Jewish communities. Southern Jewish historians note that Atlanta Jewry has still not fully recovered from the trauma of the Leo Frank case, and that the Temple bombing of the early 1960s simply reopened those wounds. During the time of the event, The New York Times quoted Gerald H. Cohen, then-president of the Atlanta Jewish Federation, as saying the pardon removed ''a tragic stigma from the great state of Georgia, indeed from the collective conscience of our nation" (Jacobs, 2015).
The Leo Frank case represents a miscarriage of justice and mistreatment as well as the zeitgeist of that time period, including many South's fears of Jews during this era.