Leo Frank’s Yahrzeit Connects Past to Present
Frank's lynching is connected to current events by speakers at annual yahrzeit observance.
Dave Schechter is a veteran journalist whose career includes writing and producing reports from Israel and elsewhere in the Middle East.
Speakers at the annual Leo Frank memorial service drew a direct line from his lynching in a Marietta woods on Aug. 17, 1915, to events in the current day.
Among them, last year, when the name of Leo Frank was invoked in anti-Jewish leaflets thrown into driveways in Sandy Springs and Dunwoody, and by neo-Nazis who marched outside an East Cobb synagogue carrying signs that declared “Leo Frank was a child killer.”
The yahrzeit service, usually held in sweltering heat at the site of a historical marker along Roswell Road near the lynching site, this year was held Aug. 18 in more comfortable surroundings, in the sanctuary of Temple Kol Emeth in Marietta.
Rabbi Steve Lebow told an audience of more than 200 people in the Kol Emeth sanctuary: “Leo Frank’s exoneration still matters because we cannot make our future good until we have made our past right.”
Robert Wittenstein, representing the Anti-Defamation League, recalled how, as a girl, his grandmother was put on a train to Birmingham, Ala., “because there were pogroms in Atlanta,” mobs seeking out Jewish business in Atlanta, as Jews who, after generations thought themselves assimilated but suddenly faced terror in “an atmosphere of hostility that was reminiscent of the old country.”
Wittenstein, whose father, Charles Wittenstein, was active in the effort that secured a pardon for Frank in the 1980s, called for Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis to refer the Frank case to the office that revisits old cases.
Willis may have other pressing cases before her, “but there has to be bandwidth for this, it’s really important,” he said.
Frank, a 29-year-old, Texas-born transplant from New York, was the superintendent of the National Pencil Company factory in downtown Atlanta. On April 26, 1913, 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.
He was convicted on Aug. 25, 1913, sentenced to death, and sent to the state prison in Milledgeville to await execution. His appeals, including to the Supreme Court of the United States, were denied. “The trial was marred by witnesses who were coached, forensic evidence that was suppressed, and testimony that was actually perjury,” Lebow said.
Frank was kidnapped from the state prison in Milledgeville and driven to the Marietta woods by a cabal of men — including prominent citizens of Cobb County — angered that Gov. John Slaton had commuted the death sentence to life in prison.
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.”
Former Gov. Roy Barnes, who has advocated for Frank to be exonerated, said: “There is no doubt in my mind that Leo Frank was and is not guilty and was innocent of the crime in which he was accused. The evidence is overwhelming.”
Barnes named prominent members of the cabal — some whose descendants are residents of Cobb County today — that planned and carried out the kidnapping and lynching, including his wife’s grandfather. He called the plot “a secret that was not spoken” in the years after.
A piece of African American history that pre-dated Leo Frank also was part of the memorial service, that of an estimated 570-plus Black people were lynched in Georgia between 1880 to 1946. One was John Bailey.
Bailey was arrested on Thursday, March 15, 1900, in Marietta for allegedly assaulting a 15-year-old white girl. He was arraigned on March 17 and was ordered held pending trial.
But on Sunday, March 18, a mob of 100 masked white men dragged him from the jail to the Marietta Square, where he was lynched. The wire apparently broke and he fell to the ground, where he then was shot 10 times, and his skull struck by a crowbar. Bailey was taken back to the jail, where he died two days later.
No one came forward to claim a reward for information. No one was held accountable. The young woman lived her life out in Cobb County and died in 1960.
Now the Cobb County Remembrance Coalition plans events to remember Bailey and, with the help of the Equal Justice Initiative, based in Montgomery, Ala., plans to erect a memorial marker to Bailey in Marietta next March.
“We want to put a face on Mr. Bailey and give him a life,” said Beverly Jackson, of the Remembrance Coalition.
Lebow also spoke of then and now, saying, “It needs to be emphasized that the Marietta of today, the Cobb Country of today, is a far, far different place than it was a century ago.”
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