Leo Frank – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Leo Frank
Leo Frank
Leo Max Frank (April 17, 1884 August 17, 1915) was a Jewish-American factory superintendent who was convicted of the murder of one of his factory employees, 13-year-old Mary Phagan. His legal case and lynching in Georgia brought attention to the topic of antisemitism in the United States.
An engineer and director of the National Pencil Company in Atlanta, Frank was convicted on August 25, 1913 for the murder of Phagan. She had been strangled on April 26 of that year and was found dead in the factory cellar the next morning. The basis for Frank's conviction largely centered around the testimony of another suspect, James "Jim" Conley, an admitted accomplice after the fact, who worked as a sweeper in the factory. Conley changed his testimony several times in various affidavits and admitted to fabricating certain parts of his story. After Frank's conviction, he and his lawyers made a series of unsuccessful appeals, losing their final appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court in April 1915. Following this decision and after deliberation, Governor John M. Slaton commuted Frank's sentence to life imprisonment. A crowd of 1,200 marched on the governor's mansion in protest. Two months later, Frank was kidnapped from prison by a group of 25 armed men and driven 170 miles (270km) to Marietta, Georgia where he was lynched.
His criminal case became the focus of powerful class, regional, and political interests. Although born in Texas, the Northern-educated Frank was seen as a carpetbagging representative of Yankee capitalism who exploited child laborers like Phagan and many working-class adult Southerners of the time, as the agrarian South was undergoing the throes of industrialization. During trial proceedings, Frank and his lawyers resorted to racial stereotypes in their defense, accusing Conley who was African-American of being especially disposed to lying and murdering because of his ethnicity. There was jubilation in the streets when Frank was convicted and sentenced to death by hanging.
Frank was posthumously pardoned in 1986 by the Georgia State Board of Pardons and Paroles, which said that it was done "[w]ithout attempting to address the question of guilt or innocence. The consensus of researchers on the subject is that Frank was wrongly convicted.
Frank was born in Cuero, Texas[1] on April 17, 1884 to Rudolph Frank and Rachel "Rae" Jacobs.[2] The family moved to Brooklyn, New York in 1884 when Frank was three months old.[3] He attended New York City public schools and graduated from Pratt Institute in 1902. He then attended Cornell University, where he studied mechanical engineering. After graduation in 1906, Frank worked briefly as a draftsman and as a testing engineer.[4]
At the invitation of his uncle Moses Frank, Leo traveled to Atlanta for two weeks in late October 1907 to meet a delegation of investors for a position with the National Pencil Company, a manufacturing plant in which Moses was a major shareholder.[2] Frank accepted the position, and traveled to Germany to study pencil manufacturing at Eberhard Faber in Bavaria. After a nine-month apprenticeship, Frank returned to the United States and began working at the National Pencil Company in August 1908.[4] Leo Frank became superintendent of the factory in September 1908.
Frank was introduced to Lucille Selig shortly after he arrived in Atlanta.[5] She came from a prominent and upper middle class Jewish family of industrialists who, two generations earlier, had founded the first synagogue in Atlanta.[6] Though she was very different from Frank, and laughed at the idea of speaking Yiddish, they were married in November 1910, at the Selig residence in Atlanta.[7] Frank described his married life as happy.
Frank was elected president of the Atlanta chapter of the B'nai B'rith, a Jewish fraternal organization, in 1912.[8] The Jewish community in Atlanta was the largest in the South, and the Franks moved in a cultured and philanthropic milieu whose leisure pursuits included opera and bridge.[9][10] Although the American South was not known for its antisemitism, Frank's northern culture and Jewish faith added to the sense that he was different.[11]
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Leo Frank - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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