Preserving Leo Frank History

Rabbi Steve Lebow has devoted three decades to seeking exoneration for Leo Frank, a Jewish man convicted and lynched for a murder that evidence suggests another man may have committed.

Over the years, Lebow has amassed “file cabinets upon file cabinets” of material relating to the case. Now 69-years-old and with an eye toward posterity, Lebow is donating his Leo Frank trove to the Atlanta Preservation Center. He already has delivered hundreds of pages, including clippings about the case and personal correspondence.

“As I get older, I worry about who’s going to want this and use it for research,” said Lebow, the Rabbi Emeritus at Temple Kol Emeth in Marietta, who also serves Congregation Rodeph Sholom in Rome on a part-time basis.

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Lebow’s donation will include files from the late attorney Dale Schwartz, who was integral to the legal effort that resulted in the state of Georgia granting Frank a posthumous pardon in 1986.

David Y. Mitchell, executive director of the Atlanta Preservation Center, said that the papers themselves will be housed at the Georgia State University Special Collections and Archives Department, as part of the GSU library’s digital collections, making them accessible to the public.

David Y. Mitchell, Executive Director of the Atlanta Preservation Center with some of the material donated by Rabbi Steve Lebow.

“You can’t do historic preservation without information,” Mitchell said. “These documents are what substantiates the conversation.”

Aug. 17 will be the 109th anniversary of the lynching of Leo Max Frank in a Marietta woods long since paved over, near Frey’s Gin Road, close to where Interstate 75 intersects Roswell Road. A memorial service will be held at 5 p.m. on Aug. 18 at Temple Kol Emeth in Marietta.

Though commonly associated with hanging, by definition lynching is any extra-judicial killing by an organized group. Though Frank often is referred to as the only Jew lynched in the United States, research suggests there might have been others.

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.

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 in Milledgeville to await execution. His appeals, including to the Supreme Court of the United States, were denied.

Doubts about Frank’s guilt remained, including in the minds of the trial judge, Leonard Strickland Roan, and attorney William Smith, who came to believe that the crime was committed by his client, Jim Conley, a 27-year-old African American factory sweeper whose testimony helped convict Frank. Conley was sentenced to a year in prison as an accomplice.

On June 21, 1915, the day before Frank’s scheduled execution — and just days before his own term ended — Gov. John Marshall Slaton commuted his sentence to life imprisonment. “I can endure misconstruction, abuse and condemnation, but I cannot stand the constant companionship of an accusing conscience, which would remind me in every thought that I, as a Governor of Georgia, failed to do what I thought to be right,” Slaton wrote.

Late on the night of Aug. 16, Frank was kidnapped from the prison and driven to a farm belonging to former Cobb County Sheriff William Frey. He was hanged from a tree shortly before dawn on Aug. 17, after asking that his wedding ring be returned to his widow, Lucille Selig Frank, in Atlanta.

Frank’s body was left hanging for hours as crowds gathered. Photographs were turned into postcards. Purported pieces of the rope were sold around Atlanta.

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.

Rabbi Steve Lebow’s desk covered with materials related to the Leo Frank case.

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 Conley to remain silent after seeing him carrying Phagan’s body.

Schwartz said that 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.”

Frank is buried at Mount Carmel Cemetery in the New York borough of Queens. Lucille Selig Frank died in 1957 and is buried between her parents’ graves in the Oakland Cemetery in Atlanta.

Mary Phagan’s grave in the Marietta Confederate Cemetery is a little more than two miles west of the lynching site.

A marker honoring Slaton was unveiled in June 2015 at the Atlanta History Center, along Slaton Drive, just off West Paces Ferry Road, close to the Slaton family home.

In August 2018 a marker commemorating the lynching was rededicated on a strip of grass and sidewalk adjacent to the parking lot of a Mexican restaurant, just south of where Roswell Road crosses under I-75. The marker, originally erected in 2008, had been removed in 2012 by the Georgia DOT during road construction.

In December 2018, a small black slab granite monument in memory of an estimated 570-plus Georgians lynched between 1880-1946 was placed near the Frank marker.

A sign that Lebow affixed in 1995, on the 80th anniversary of the lynching, to a building near the site was removed when the building was razed and since has gone missing. That marker read: “Wrongly accused, Falsely convicted, Wantonly murdered” and noted the 1986 pardon.

A second sign, placed there in 2005, now rests near the historical marker. That plaque reads: “Am I my brother’s Keeper? On the 90th anniversary of the lynching and in memory of all victims of lynching.”

Collections of memorabilia, photographs, and papers related to the Frank case can be found at several Atlanta-area institutions, including the William Breman Jewish Heritage Museum and the Atlanta History Center.

Beyond digitizing the material that Lebow is donating, Mitchell envisions tours that would encompass relevant Leo Frank sites in Marietta and Atlanta. These would be part of the Atlanta Preservation Center’s “Phoenix Flies” program, which provides tours of historic sites, structures, and neighborhoods in the metro area.

The APC and Landmark Preservation oversaw a recent renovation of the Memorial to the Six Million at Greenwood Cemetery, which was rededicated at a Yom HaShoah/Holocaust Remembrance Day event in May.

“My goal is historic preservation,” Mitchell said. “Sometimes the preservation arguably is sustained, supported, increased, and given significance by the information that we continue to collect.”

Lebow takes a long view: “I feel certain that he will be exonerated, someday, even if it’s during my lifetime or long after I have shuffled off this mortal coil. So the record of that exoneration will be a part of the ultimate story that needs to be preserved.”