Victims Memorial Vandalized in Marietta

A memorial to lynching victims, adjacent to the Leo Frank memorial in Marietta, has been toppled.

The engraved black granite slab was forcibly removed from the pedestal to which it was attached by steel pins and left lying on the ground. The damage was discovered Thursday morning, Feb. 10, by a visitor to the site on Roswell Road, near Interstate 75. Photographs shared with the AJT show no visible clue as to how the monument was dislodged. No other vandalism or defacement was apparent at the site. The Anti-Defamation League contacted law enforcement.

The new Georgia lynching memorial sits a few feet from the plaque memorializing Leo Frank’s lynching in August 1915.

Jordan Strong, a Waleska, Ga., resident, told the AJT that he was moved to visit the site after his 13-year-old son came home from school Wednesday with questions about what his class had learned about the Leo Frank case. As he walked from his car, “I was on the phone with my wife. I said, you’ve got to be freaking kidding me. Somebody has managed to tip this thing over,” Strong said.

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The lynching memorial landed face up, allowing Strong to read the inscription:
In respectful memory of the thousands across America, denied justice by lynching: Victims of hatred, prejudice and ignorance.
Between 1880-1946, ~570 Georgians were lynched.
ADL
Jewish American Society for Historic Preservation
Rabbi Steven Lebow, Temple Kol Emeth

The memorial to lynching victims was installed in December 2018, three months after the rededication of the Leo Frank memorial. The Frank marker had been removed four years earlier by the Georgia Department of Transportation because of road construction. It consists of a metal plaque on a pole anchored in a grassy area carved out by GDOT.

Leo Frank Memorial sits adjacent to the new Georgia Lynching memorial.

Frank, a Jewish factory superintendent, was lynched on Aug. 17, 1915, in a long since built over woods along what now is Frey’s Gins Road. Frank was convicted in 1913 of murder in the death of 13-year-old Mary Phagan, who worked at the Atlanta pencil factory where he was the manager. Cobb County residents, angered by Gov. John Slaton’s commutation of the death sentence, kidnapped Frank from the state prison in Milledgeville and drove him to woods where he was hanged.
Frank’s is the only known lynching of a Jew in the United States.

When the lynching memorial was installed, an ADL statement said: “This memorial is the first to recognize all victims of lynching in Georgia. That makes it very significant. The placement of the memorial at the Leo Frank historical marker is very appropriate. ADL’s founders recognized through our mission that you cannot just fight hate against Jews but must speak out no matter who is targeted by hateful acts. While Leo Frank is the one Jewish lynching victim we are aware of, there were thousands of African Americans and others lynched, not just in Georgia, but across the country.”

By some estimates, as many as 95 percent of those lynched in Georgia were African Americans. The memorial uses the “~” figure because the documented number of lynchings may be incomplete.

The benefactor for the lynching memorial, as for the Leo Frank plaque, was Jerry Klinger, a 74-year-old retired financial services executive from Rockville, Md., and founder of the Jewish American Society for Historic Preservation. JASHP has placed historic markers at more than 110 locations in the United States alone and others in a half dozen countries.

The lynching memorial — 36 inches tall, 14 inches wide at its base and six inches in depth — was crafted to Klinger’s specifications by the Roberts-Shields Memorial Company in Marietta.

The damage can and will be fixed, Klinger said, but the incident presents a learning opportunity to teach about “the bigotry and hatred” that makes such memorials necessary. “I really see these guys as cowards. They’re being very blatant about what they’re doing,” Klinger said.

Strong and his wife, Elizabeth, are the parents of three boys and a daughter, ranging in age from 15 to 8 years old. They are members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, sometimes referred to as Mormons.

“We want our kids to be educated that you should stand up for anyone, regardless of who they are, regardless of their religion or race,” Strong said. “We want them to also understand that there are people out there who are opposed to anything other than what they think is okay.”