The Courageous Life of Lucille Selig Frank

Ann Hite was 9 years old when her grandmother described seeing Leo Frank’s body hanging from the tree where he was lynched at sunrise on Aug. 17, 1915, in a Marietta woods.

Inas Lord’s accounts of that day may have varied — she was just 6 years old at the time — “but one thing that never changed about it was that it made an impression on her that his throat was open and he was bleeding on his white shirt,” said Hite, an award-winning Southern writer and the author of an upcoming book about Lucille Selig Frank, Leo Frank’s wife and widow.

Indeed, when Frank was kidnapped from the state prison in Milledgeville — where he was awaiting execution for a murder that another man may have committed — his neck was healing after being slashed by another prisoner.

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The story Hite heard from her grandmother sparked a nearly five-decade obsession with the case. Leo Frank is “still relevant today because we have had, we have the same problems as we had in 1913 and 1915 . . . the same racism and antisemitism,” she said.

Ann Hite’s “Lucille Selig Frank: The Wife Of Leo M. Frank and Echoes of The Mary Phagan Murder Case” is to be published in September 2025 by Mercer University Press.

“Lucille Selig Frank: The Wife Of Leo M. Frank and Echoes of The Mary Phagan Murder Case” is to be published in September 2025 by Mercer University Press.

The book is a change of pace for Hite, the author of more than a dozen works of fiction, most set in and around Black Mountain, North Carolina, and involving ghosts or spirits of one sort or another. Her debut novel, “Ghost on Black Mountain,” won her a 2012 Georgia Author of the Year prize. She has been short-listed for several other honors. Hite’s most recent work, “Haints on Black Mountain,” a collection of short stories, was published in May 2023.

Hite was moved to write a work of nonfiction after talking with Steve Oney about his book about the Leo Frank case, titled “And The Dead Shall Rise.” When Lucille Frank, then 33-years-old, returned to Atlanta from Memphis six years following the lynching, she found her work at J.P. Allen, a women’s store. There, “she would regularly wait on the wives and children of the lynching brethren — she unaware of their connection to her husband’s death and they unaware, too,” Oney wrote.

That detail caught Hite’s attention. “The image that convinced me to write it as non-fiction, rather than as a historical fiction novel, was the image of her selling gloves at a kiosk to women whose husbands helped hang her husband,” she said. “Lucille was such a brave woman. Way before her time.”

Leo Frank was superintendent of the National Pencil Company factory in downtown Atlanta. On April 26, 1913, which was Confederate Memorial Day, 13-year-old Mary Phagan 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.

Atlanta newspapers whipped up a frenzy against the 29-year-old, Texas-born transplant from New York. Crowds outside the courthouse were heard to yell epithets about Jews. Frank was convicted on Aug. 25, 1913. “The trial was marred by witnesses who were coached, forensic evidence that was suppressed, and testimony that was actually perjury,” said Rabbi Steve Lebow, Rabbi Emeritus at Temple Kol Emeth, in Marietta, who has devoted three decades to seeking exoneration of Frank.

Ann Hite at her desk working on her upcoming book on Lucille Selig Frank.

Frank’s appeals, including to the Supreme Court of the United States, were denied.

A cabal calling itself the Knights of Mary Phagan planned and carried out the lynching. Its ranks included distinguished residents of Cobb County. They were enraged in June 1915 when Georgia Gov. John Slaton commuted Frank’s death sentence to life in prison. Particularly galling was that Slaton — who harbored doubts about Frank’s guilt after reviewing the case — did so the day before Frank’s scheduled execution and just days before he was to leave office.

Late on the night of Aug. 14, with the connivance of prison personnel, Frank was bundled out of the state prison and driven to the woods near what now is Frey’s Gin Road in Marietta. There he was lynched, after asking his killers to return his wedding ring to his wife.

Frank’s body was left hanging for hours. Word spread and crowds gathered. Photographs of Frank hanging from the tree were turned into postcards and sold in Atlanta, as were purported pieces of the rope that snapped his neck.

No one was arrested or prosecuted for the kidnapping or lynching.

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.

On March 11, 1986, the Georgia Board of Pardons and Parole 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.”

Hite’s admiration for Lucille Frank stems from the Atlanta native’s “willingness not just to stand up, but she never backed down. It would have been so easy for her to back down and be quiet and walk away. That’s the tenacity that we as women need today. When we’re being marginalized, remember women like Lucille, who was not going to have it.”

“Take the Jewish equation out of it,” said Hite, who is not Jewish. “She’s an example for my daughters and my granddaughters. She believed what she believed, and she stood up to the biggest men around.”

“She was so strong, at such a young age, and I know 25 [her age when Leo Frank was arrested and convicted] wasn’t as young then as it is now. When you read her letters, you see what a strong person she was. She was a force to be reckoned with,” Hite said.

Lucille’s letters to Atlanta newspapers were directed at prosecutor Hugh Dorsey, about his treatment of potential witnesses on behalf of her husband. “She didn’t back down even when he answered in the same papers. She wrote another letter.

Also, her final statement on the subject of the lynching was in letter form to the Augusta Chronicle, where she acknowledged that the people who actually did the deed of taking her husband’s life were only puppets for what she called ‘designing persons,’ the master minds,” Hite said.

In her research, Hite also examined photographs, including one — donated to the Kenan Research Center at the Atlanta History Center by a member of the Phagan family — that showed “tables with watermelon and pop and all kinds of food, they were having a big picnic out there.”

Inas Lord was brought to the lynching site by her father, Henry Lee Hawkins. Hite, who lives in Marietta, is discomfited knowing that her family participated in such an orgy. “I am more embarrassed by my great-grandfather. My grandmother was too young to say no she wasn’t going. I think one of the reasons she told me the story at my young age was to leave an imprint on me to know these kind of horrific things can happen. I would like to think she wanted me to fight against the injustices that take place, but that is probably taking it too far,” she said. By chance, Hite’s husband is cousins with Mary Phagan’s great-nephews.

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

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

The woods where Frank was hung have long since been built over. In August 2018, a marker commemorating the lynching was rededicated on a strip of grass and sidewalk not far away, next to the parking lot of a Mexican restaurant, just south of where Roswell Road in Marietta crosses under Interstate 75.