Leo Frank Case Still Relevant 110 Years Later

The sun rose just before 6 a.m. on Tuesday, Aug. 17, 1915.

Having driven through the night, a phalanx of cars arrived in a Marietta woods. A 31-year-old Jewish man, Leo Max Frank, was bundled out of one of the vehicles.

A rope was thrown over a tree. A noose was placed around his neck. Frank, knowing his fate at the hands of these vigilantes, asked that his wedding ring be given to his wife. A table was kicked out from under Frank’s feet and he was hanged.

Frank’s body was left on that tree for hours as a celebratory crowd gathered, eventually numbering upwards of 3,000 men, women, and children.

Aug. 17, 2025, will be the 110th anniversary of that lynching, which traumatized Atlanta’s Jewish community for decades and, in the view of four people who gathered July 10 to discuss the case, remains relevant.

Recently retired public radio host Lois Reitzes moderated the forum before an audience of about 350 people at the Atlanta History Center, which co-sponsored the event with the Breman Museum of Jewish Heritage.

Steve Oney, author of, “And the Dead Shall Rise: The Murder of Mary Phagan and the Lynching of Leo Frank,” considered the definitive book on the case, reviewed the timeline.

Oney said that in the period of the case, the United States, and the South in particular, were undergoing “divisive change.” The murder of a child laborer was “a symbol of the old fading order, at a noisy modern factory . . . pitted the past against the future.”

The result, he said, was an Atlanta story that became “a national event.”

In 1913, Frank, a 29-year-old Texas-born transplant from New York, was superintendent of the National Pencil Company factory in downtown Atlanta.

On April 26, which was Confederate Memorial Day, 13-year-old Mary Phagan, an employee from Marietta, came to pick up $1.20 owed her for work done the previous week. Her body was discovered early the next morning in the factory basement. Three days later, Frank was arrested and charged with murder.

Frank’s trial in Fulton County Superior Court took place in an atmosphere of hysteria and rumor, inflamed by sensationalist newspaper coverage.

He was convicted on Aug. 25, 1913, sentenced to death, and sent to the state prison farm in Milledgeville to await execution. His appeals, including to the Supreme Court of the United States, were denied.

On June 21, 1915, the day before Frank’s scheduled execution — and just days before his own term in office ended — Gov. John Marshall Slaton commuted the sentence to life imprisonment.

Late on the night of Aug. 16, Frank was kidnapped from the prison and driven to a Marietta farm belonging to former Cobb County Sheriff William Frey.

The kidnapping and lynching were organized by a cabal calling itself the Knights of Mary Phagan, organized by prominent citizens of Marietta and Cobb County. No one was prosecuted for Frank’s murder.

The lynching took place a couple of miles away from Phagan’s grave in the Marietta City Cemetery.

Before the trial and the lynching, the Jews of German heritage who then dominated the community believed “they had found a new home in the American South,” said Sandy Berman, founding archivist at The Breman Museum of Jewish Heritage. “They became part of the fabric of the Atlanta community,” accepting the “cultural mores” of Atlanta and the South.

But with the Frank case, “Life for the Jews in Atlanta starts to change,” Berman said, leaving the community “never again as secure as they once perceived it to be.”

“The community, it just was paralyzed,” she said. “They laid low, they really didn’t do anything . . . [afraid] of undermining what security they had left.”

“This sentiment lasted for decades,” Berman said. The Leo Frank case was a little-discussed “taboo subject across the board.”

In Cobb County, the Leo Frank case was “an unspoken secret, nobody talked about it,” former Georgia Gov. Roy Barnes said.

So great was the silence that until a list of the perpetrators was published decades later, Barnes’ wife, Marie Dobbs Barnes, was unaware that her grandfather, Cicero Dobbs, owner of a taxi company, had provided vehicles used in the kidnapping of Frank from the state prison.

Barnes wondered aloud about “what was it that led the best members of the community, the leading folks of the community, to lose their heads and lynch Leo Frank.”

Using examples from two films and two television programs, Emory University professor Matthew Bernstein, author of, “Screening a Lynching: The Leo Frank Case on Film and Television,” said that the case offered a “mesh of genres” — a murder mystery, the story of a marriage, a courtroom drama, ambitious politicians, a miscarriage of justice, and cynical and sensationalist journalism.

Bernstein said that, in general, the dramatizations were “well researched,” even if some “took dramatic license to get a more abstract truth.”

In 1982, 83-year-old Alonzo Mann told The Tennessean newspaper in Nashville how, as a boy working in the pencil factory, he was threatened by Jim Conley, a Black janitor, to remain silent after seeing Conley carrying Phagan’s body. The defense argued that Conley, who became the prosecution’s chief witness (and later was sentenced to a year in prison as an accomplice), committed the killing.

Mann recalled hearing anti-Jewish epithets as he entered the courthouse to testify.

The Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles in December 1983 rejected an appeal of Frank’s conviction, saying that his innocence could not be established without doubt.

On March 11, 1986, the board granted a posthumous pardon “without attempting to address the question of guilt or innocence and in recognition of the state’s failure to protect the person of Leo M. Frank and thereby preserve his opportunity for continued legal appeal of his conviction, and in recognition of the state’s failure to bring his killers to justice, and as an effort to heal old wounds.”

Barnes has been a leading advocate — along with Rabbi Steve Lebow, Rabbi Emeritus of Temple Kol Emeth — in pressing for exoneration of Leo Frank. The most likely avenue would be for the Fulton County attorney’s office to vacate the conviction.

The case remains controversial. Neo-Nazis continue to make Leo Frank a focus of their efforts to foment antisemitism, examples including anti-Jewish leaflets thrown in driveways in metro Atlanta in February 2023 and a march outside a Cobb County synagogue in June 2023.

As the 110th anniversary of the lynching nears, the panelists at the Atlanta History Center connected the case with current concerns.

Bernstein expressed concern about the mainstreaming of extremist views. A “major social media effort is required,” he said. “You cannot tell the truth of the Frank case in a TikTok video.”

Berman urged those interested to “keep promoting the Frank case in all kinds of formats,” recommending visits to The Breman Museum’s archive on the case. “It doesn’t matter how you discover the truth. It only matters that you’re searching for the truth,” she said.

Oney, author of the highly-regarded book on the Leo Frank case, said that the challenge for journalists “is to try to tell the truth as best you can and hope that reasonable people will read it and respond accordingly.”

And former Gov. Barnes said: “The reason that Leo Frank is relevant today is to show folks that they have to have moral courage to stand up or it will happen again. The life and the circumstances we live today is ripe for antisemitism, it’s ripe for anti-immigration, it’s ripe to find somebody we can blame for the changes we are uncomfortable about.”