by Dale Bennett

ON THIS, the 112th anniversary of the rape and strangulation murder of 13-year-old Mary Phagan by her sweatshop boss — and Atlanta B’nai B’rith president — Leo Max Frank, let us remember her young life and reflect on the massive Jewish propaganda machine that has been attempting to whitewash her killer’s reputation for more than a century.

Besides the victim, Mary Phagan, there were five people in the National Pencil Company building when she was killed on 26 April 1913. We know that four of them didn’t do it. That leaves Leo Frank.

110 years later, the ADL is still trying to frame the janitor, Jim Conley, for Mary Phagan’s murder: How likely is it that Conley, a Black man—in 1913 Georgia—would rape and kill a White girl just a few feet from the unlocked glass-paneled front entrance door of the National Pencil Company, where people were coming and going all day, right at the foot of an open staircase at the top of which was Leo Frank’s open office door? Preposterous.

Leo Frank was elected the Atlanta B’nai B’rith president of the Gate City Lodge #144 in 1912 and his Summer of 1913 conviction for the rape and strangulation-murder of 13-year-old Mary Phagan had galvanized B’nai B’rith HQ to found the ADL less than two months after the fact.

Even though Leo Frank was convicted in late August 1913, in September 1913 his 500-member Independent Order of B’nai B’rith fraternal organization in Georgia voted unanimously (see Atlanta Constitution, September 24, 1913 at leofrank.info) to re-elect him their president. So while Leo Frank was incarcerated in the city jail as his appeals were wending their way through the appellate courts, he was running the affairs of this powerful Atlanta Jewish group like a powerful mafia boss behind bars until the Autumn of 1914. He was not re-elected once the affidavits, testimony, and evidence of the Leo Frank Georgia Supreme Court records were revealed to the public (available at the Internet Archive and leofrank.info).

A must-read on the topic is “100 Reasons Leo Frank Is Guilty” from the American Mercury, and another important source every student of the case must read are the contemporary works of Tom Watson.

I encourage everyone to please listen to the works of investigative journalist Tom Watson in the audio books by Vanessa Neubauer, from the pages of Watson’s Jeffersonian Magazine, January, March, August, September and October of 1915.

I promise you won’t be disappointed.

1. Tom Watson: The Leo Frank Case

2. Tom Watson: A Full Review of the Leo Frank Case

3. Tom Watson: The Celebrated Case of The State of Georgia vs. Leo Frank

4. Tom Watson: The Official Record in the Case of Leo Frank, a Jew Pervert

5. Tom Watson: The Rich Jews Indict a State!

Tom Watson articulated the evidence, testimony and exhibits of the Leo Frank trial with such force and power it is impossible to believe Leo Frank is innocent. Listen and find out why!

Introduction to Mary Phagan-Kean’s Insights into the Murder of Her Great Aunt

HERE ARE SOME of the key points offered by Mary Phagan-Kean in her latest interview with social media activist Ryan Dawson. (video above)

Mary Phagan-Kean’s journey into the dark and complex narrative surrounding the murder of her great aunt, Mary Phagan, began unexpectedly. Her father first shared the story after her name was recognized by a teacher, sparking a lifelong quest for truth and justice. The tale, as recounted by her father, painted a grim picture of Leo Frank, the man convicted of Mary Phagan’s murder. According to testimony, Frank was a sexual pervert who molested numerous young girls and even boys, earning him the moniker “the B’nai B’rith pedophile” — a reference to the fact that he was president of the Atlanta chapter of the Jewish fraternal order B’nai B’rith, the organization which gave birth to the powerful ADL, or “Anti-Defamation League.” Frank was even re-elected president of the group after his conviction for murdering little Mary.

The Vigilance Committee, which consisted of leading community leaders and which sought “Southern justice” after a corrupt governor (who was a partner in the law firm that defended Frank) commuted Frank’s death sentence, played a pivotal role in the case by executing him themselves after, as they saw it, outside influencers had illegally prevented his lawful hanging. (The New York Times-invented “Knights of Mary Phagan” never existed. That moniker was likely invented to link the Vigilance Committee to similar-sounding “Knights” factions of the Ku Klux Klan, in order to smear the Committee.)

The lynching of Frank was the first done by automobile, quite a feat considering the limited ownership of automobiles in Marietta, Georgia, in 1915 — further proving that prominent citizens, who were outraged by Governor Slaton’s involvement in the law firm that defended Frank, and his commutation of his sentence, were involved, and not a “mob.”

The Anti-Defamation League, an organization with a vested interest in the outcome, has been relentless in its efforts to secure a full pardon for Frank for decades. Their tactics, however, have been marred by deception and misinformation, leading to numerous hoaxes, including false claims about a pardon (the existing “pardon” does not address his guilt at all).

Mary Phagan-Kean’s father never mentioned Frank’s Jewishness but emphasized his perverse behavior. Her grandfather, Mary Phagan’s brother, was deeply emotionally affected by the case, becoming distraught when asked about it, particularly noting the resemblance between Mary Phagan-Kean and little Mary.

The narrative surrounding the case is fraught with controversy. Jews have even attempted to portray Mary Phagan as a seducer, a claim that Mary Phagan-Kean vehemently rejects.

There has been documented collusion between Jewish groups and officials to alter the wording on Mary’s commemorative plaque, with the altered plaque suggesting that Frank was exonerated for the murder — which he was not. This alteration occurred under the cover of night and was set up during secret meetings from which the Phagan family — and the public — were excluded, further obscuring the truth.

Rabbi Steven Lebow, a prominent figure in the area Jewish community, demanded that Mary’s marker be changed because it “offended” the Jewish community to tell the truth about the non-pardon. This defense of a convicted child rapist and murderer is a strange hill for Jewish groups to die on.

During the 1960s, when Jewish authors Leonard Dinnerstein and Harry Golden were writing their books on the case, the trial transcript mysteriously disappeared, making it unavailable for public scrutiny.

The best outcome of the efforts of both sides in this case, Mrs. Phagan-Kean says, has been the creation of a team to digitize and make all relevant documents on the case available and searchable online. And the best way to study the case, she avers, is to examine these newspaper articles in conjunction with the Brief of Evidence (all now available on leofrank.info and leofrank.org). Contrary to popular belief, the newspapers were pro-Frank and had Jewish editors, contradicting the notion of an anti-Frank, anti-Jewish atmosphere. Nevertheless, the firsthand reports of the trial at that time were mostly honest and paint a very different picture from that of the “Leo Frank is an innocent victim of anti-Semitism” narrative being pushed today. (One can learn, for example, that the grand jury that indicted Frank included four Jews out of 21 members, and that all voted to charge Frank with the murder.)

The Jewish community’s claims that Frank did not know Mary Phagan are untenable. Frank walked past her daily for a year, handled her pay packets weekly, and even directed police to investigate James Gannt, claiming he was “close to” Mary. These actions suggest a familiarity that contradicts his claim of ignorance.

The Anti-Defamation League’s never-ending defense of Frank has inadvertently contributed to the cause they claim to oppose: anti-Semitism.

Mary Phagan was brutally raped, as evidenced by the autopsy report, which, though difficult to read, showed no markings on her body except those of strangulation. There was blood in her panties, and family proof confirmed she was not on her menstrual cycle. ADL-linked author Steven Oney referred to Mary as a “voluptuous woman,” a claim that Parade magazine attempted to exploit this by implying she was “flirting” before her death, a particularly odious insinuation.

A 1980s miniseries, inspired by Harry Golden’s book and dubious material from Alonzo Mann, was produced without consultation with Mary Phagan’s family. This miniseries further muddied the waters of the case.

In a more recent development, the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles, under pressure from Rabbi Lebow and the Jewish power structure, established a “Conviction Integrity Unit” in Atlanta. This unit, ostensibly to exonerate falsely convicted individuals, including Blacks, was really created explicitly to push for the exoneration of Frank. They have even floated the idea of a new trial for Frank, despite the extreme improbability of a proper prosecution more than a century later.

Contrary to ADL claims, the “mass exodus” of Jews from the area after the Frank case never occurred. This is one of the many hoaxes that will be debunked in the forthcoming new edition of Mrs. Phagan-Kean’s book, The Murder of Little Mary Phagan.

Mary Phagan-Kean’s father’s enduring belief was that “the truth will always win,” a sentiment that continues to guide her quest for justice.

by Benjamin Smith
Edited by John Anderson

ON 11 MARCH 2025, Mary Phagan-Kean — great-niece of 13-year-old Mary Phagan, who was brutally murdered by Jewish B’nai B’rith official Leo Frank in 1913 — was interviewed on the Stew Peters television program. You can watch that interview by clicking the video link above.

The trial, conviction, and execution of Frank was the major motivation behind the founding of today’s powerful “Anti-Defamation League” (ADL¹), which works to censor and punish those who speak out about Jewish abuses of power. Today, the ADL — along with their allies in the media, academia, and government — maintain that Leo Frank was an “innocent victim of anti-Semitism,” and deliberately ignore and downplay the huge mountain of evidence (the Brief of Evidence alone is well over three hundred pages long and Leo Frank’s appeals to the Georgia Supreme Court and United States Supreme Court are several thousands of pages) proving his guilt, and ignoring the fact that every court from the Grand Jury, the Georgia Court of Appeals, up to and including the Supreme Court of the United States — and every court in between — affirmed his guilt (even though he was defended by a team of the most skillful, famous, and expensive lawyers of his time²).

Mrs. Phagan-Kean recounts the emotionally powerful story of how she first discovered that she was related to the girl who is probably the most well-known American murder victim of her generation, and how, after seeing how the vast monetary and political resources of the ADL and other organized Jewish groups were being used to confuse and trick the public into believing that the killer, Leo Frank, was actually the victim in this case, she decided to devote her life to bringing the truth to light.

In this program she discusses how, after Mary’s sex murder, Frank’s team and allies:

• Planted fake evidence to frame two innocent Black men for the crime: When the first frame, of night watchman New Lee, failed (they planted a fake bloody shirt at his home as well as altered his time card for that night³), they tried to frame janitor Jim Conley (with a fake planted bloody club and pay stub) and are still trying to frame him in 2025. Are these the acts of an innocent man?
• Created out of whole cloth, years later, a fake story of how the killer left “bite marks” on Mary Phagan’s body, marks which supposedly didn’t match Leo Frank’s dental X-rays (the autopsy report indicated no such marks whatever, and dental X-rays were not used in any Georgia case until decades after Frank’s trial)
• Tried to falsely imply that 13-year-old Mary Phagan, whose reputation was absolutely unimpeachable, was of low moral character and some kind of “seductress” — again, totally inverting the victim and perpetrator roles in the case.
• Created a false story, months after the trial, that a screaming and seething “anti-Semitic mob” dominated the trial for weeks, shouting “Hang the Jew or we’ll hang you” and similar epithets within hearing of the judge and jury. Contemporary pictures and newspaper reports prove that no such mob ever existed.
• Had the audacity to change — in the dead of night and without informing the Phagan family — the historical marker at Mary Phagan’s grave site, so its text reflected the Jewish narrative of Frank’s “innocence.” (See below for further details)
• Have consistently, right up to 2025, held secret meetings with Georgia and Fulton County officials — meetings from which the Phagan family, the press, and the public at large were purposely excluded — in an attempt to get Leo Frank officially exonerated. The meeting minutes also seemingly disappear or are not taken. Mary Phagan-Kean has asked to see these and has been prevented from doing so.
• And much more!

You’ll learn that Mrs. Phagan-Kean’s book about the case — The Murder of Little Mary Phagan — is about to be released this year in a brand-new, much-expanded edition.

Make sure and share this interview with everyone you know. You can’t understand what is happening in the world today without understanding the powerful forces that tried — and are still trying — to exonerate this vile rapist and child-murderer.

* * *

1. Leo Frank was president of the Atlanta B’nai B’rith twice and was even re-elected after his conviction for the rape and strangulation of Mary Phagan. B’nai B’rith founded the ADL, originally called the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith before being shortened to just the Anti-Defamation League. The indictment, trial, and conviction of Leo Frank are what led to the founding of the ADL, not his execution, as the first announcement of its creation was on September 16th, 1913. Leo Frank was hanged in 1915.
2. An interesting thing to note here is that Georgia Governor John Slaton was a partner at the same law firm as Luther Z. Rosser, Leo Frank’s defense attorney.
3. Below is Defendant’s Exhibit 1, from the Brief of Evidence, showing where Leo Frank erased Newt Lee’s time stamps of 10:00 pm, 11:30 pm, 12:30 am, and 2:30 am to make it appear that he had been too busy with Mary Phagan to punch his time card:

* * *

Below is the original inscription on the historical marker at Mary Phagan’s grave site where it did not hide the fact that Frank’s pardon did not officially exonerate him from the crime of murder. The newer historical marker does not provide this specific fact and implies that the pardon absolved him of the crime which is not true:

Below is what it was then changed to with no vote and no media present, in 1995. Most people, who are not well-researched in the case, would assume that “he was issued a pardon,” means that he was absolved of the crime:

The Marietta Daily Journal published an article describing what happened and why the Phagan family was outraged by this (transcribed below):

“Family of Mary Phagan protests marker change

“Without a formal vote and with the press absent, Marietta City Council has changed the inscription on the city’s historic marker at the grave of rape-murder victim Mary Phagan in the Marietta City Cemetery. The Phagan family is blaming Councilman Philip Goldstein.

“The descendants of Miss Phagan are upset because the family was not notified before or after the change, and only learned of it on a cemetery-cleaning visit. The family says the newly-placed marker – which sits on a city-maintained path near the grave and is not to be confused with Miss Phagan’s ornate tombstone, which makes no mention of the circumstances of her death – omits the reason for the 1986 posthumous pardon given Leo Frank.

“Frank – Miss Phagan’s boss – was convicted in 1913 by a Fulton Superior Court jury of the 13-year-old girl’s murder in an Atlanta pencil factory and sentenced to hang. When Gov. John Slaton commuted Frank’s sentence to life in 1915, a group of Marietta men abducted Frank from the state prison near Milledgeville and lynched him near what is now the Big Chicken on Frey’s Gin Road in Marietta.

[Years later someone vandalized the elegant white marble flowerpot situated at the footer of the epitaph slab and stole the broken piece of it.]

“The Phagan family initially opposed placing a marker at their ancestor’s grave, fearing there would be increased damage to the cemetery plot and curiosity seekers would leave graffiti. That hasn’t happened. Late Mayor Joe Mack Wilson told east Cobb resident and Cherokee County special education teacher Mary Phagan Keen, a great-niece of Mary Phagan, that the grave was the most sought by visitors to Marietta and should have a marker, along with several other notable graves in the cemetery.

[Newly Concealing the fact that Leo M. Frank was not officially exonerated]

“Mayor Wilson told the Phagan family the city would let them approve the text of the marker. The family insisted the unusual conditions of Frank’s 1986 pardon be explained. That was done. Now controversy has arisen because that portion of the marker has been changed.

“The Georgia Pardons and Parole Board in 1983 turned down a request for a pardon based on Frank’s alleged innocence. [Leo] Frank’s former office boy, Alonzo Mann, told two Nashville Tennessean newsmen he saw black janitor Jim Conley holding a limp body in his arms the day of the murder. In its 1983 denial of a pardon for Frank, the board said after Mann’s testimony it “did not find conclusive evidence proving beyond any doubt that Frank was innocent.”

“A new parole board then granted Frank a pardon in 1986 on the grounds the state did not protect him in prison, thereby allowing him to be lynched and thus ending any further court appeals. Frank’s conviction was appealed unsuccessfully by his lawyers three times to the Georgia Supreme Court and twice to the U.S. Supreme Court.

“The 1986 pardon said: “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…the board hereby grants to Leo M. Frank a pardon.” The family opposed the 1986 pardon, and now is irked at the council and [Philip] Goldstein.

[The Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles failed to mention the fact that Leo Frank had fully exhausted all of his trial appeals at the Georgia and Federal Supreme Court in April of 1915.]

“”We are as much a victim as the family of Leo Frank,” said Ms. Keen. For 80 years, we have been the object of the curiosity-seekers and subjected to unfair and untrue books and TV docudramas. The current council didn’t show the same respect to us as did Mayor Wilson and a previous council.” Ms. Keen’s father, James Phagan, said the action was “extremely insensitive of the council” and “disingenuous of Councilman [Philip] Goldstein. How can you separate Mary Phagan and Leo Frank?” he asked. “Can you mention the Holocaust and not mention Hitler? It’s simply pandering by Councilman [Philip] Goldstein to a segment of the community. It’s another effort to change history.”

“The inscription change was made by the Parks and Tourism Committee chaired by Councilman Dan Cox. Members are Councilwoman Betty Hunter and Goldstein. The full council OK’d the action. Cox admitted the committee had yielded to “political pressure” by [Philip] Goldstein and the Jewish community. Calling the change “a no-win situation,” Cox said he reluctantly consented to the change “because it offended a part of the community.”

[August 17, 1995. Leo Frank’s Lynching Site, 1200 Roswell Road, Marietta, Cobb County, Georgia]

“On the 80th anniversary of Frank’s lynching on Aug. 17, [1995] a group of Jewish leaders led by Rabbi Steven Lebow of Temple Kol Emeth in East Cobb said the historic marker at Mary Phagan’s grave should be removed. The group placed a small plaque in the side of the VPI Corp. building owned by Roy Varner at 1200 Roswell St., near the site of Frank’s lynching. The plaque reads: “Wrongly Accused, Falsely Convicted and Wantonly Murdered.” Attending the ceremony were Marietta Councilmen Goldstein and James Dodd, who told Jewish leaders they would look into removing the line of the marker that refers to the pardon conditions.

“”This is a plaque that marks the grave of Mary Phagan,” said [Philip] Goldstein. “The last two lines deal with information on Leo Frank, and it’s not his grave.” Goldstein was quoted in the Jewish Times as saying: “The wording is factually correct. The mention of Frank [not getting officially exonerated] on Phagan’s marker should be deleted because it is irrelevant, not because it upsets the Jewish community.”

“It was Dodd who brought the matter before council, supported by [Philip] Goldstein. “This is a lose-lose situation for me,” [Philip] Goldstein said. The marker referring to the condition of Frank’s pardon has been removed and replaced with a marker the Phagan family had objected to.”

A letter to the editor regarding the incident (transcribed below):

In this year of 2024, on the 111th anniversary of the murder of 13-year-old Mary Phagan by Jewish sex killer Leo Frank, we present this article, based on a piece from the alternative media.

by K.A. Strom and Valdis Bell

I BELIEVE IT was the great writer Daniel Concannon who first said that in America, no matter who you vote for you always get Jonathan Greenblatt.

Greenblatt looks like a particularly filthy gunsel from a 1940s gangster movie. He makes Peter Lorre look handsome. He’s the head of the Jewish Anti-Defamation League (or ADL), which is perhaps the foremost anti-Gentile hate operation in America today. It is the ADL who decides what you get to hear or see in the media, and what you are allowed to say in public and on social media. It would be better named the Defamation League, as one of their main activities is defaming and deplatforming and smearing and financially and personally ruining anyone who exposes Jewish crimes or the genocidal nature of the Jewish agenda.

As proof that the ADL gets what it wants, and what it wants is to silence anyone who inhibits the Jewish agenda of a brown America, look at what happened to populist Tucker Carlson last year. The most highly-rated talk show host on the dinosaur media, so well-liked that a recent poll puts his popularity higher than that of the entire Fox News Network where he appeared, Carlson was fired by mega-Zionist and possibly crypto- or part-Jew Rupert Murdoch without reason being given. Jonathan Greenblatt has been pushing for Carlson to be fired for at least two years. Take a look at this softball CNN interview with Greenblatt from 12 April 2021. CNN is owned and run by Jews.

Greenblatt gets all worked up emotionally when he tells Brian Stelter, “Tucker Carlson has got to go!” calling for him to be deplatformed, and literally a few seconds later screeches “This is not cancel culture.” Right. Greenblatt and the ADL goddamned invented cancel culture, for the gods’ sake. It’s the very basis of their existence. Apparently Tucker had mentioned the increasingly obvious fact that there a media agenda to replace the heritage population of the US and Europe and other Western nations. (It’s okay for the controlled media to mention this, they often do, so long as they frame it as a good and inevitable thing. But Tucker hadn’t made the obligatory ritual incantations, and that might stir up the peasants and get them thinking maybe, just maybe, someone is trying to hurt them — something that Greenblatt and his ilk cannot tolerate.)

Now, I’m not a hod carrier for Tucker Carlson. He articulates many of the problems we face well. He informs us about a few parts of the media’s agenda that the rest of the Jewish-controlled media try to downplay or keep hidden. But, like Lucy Van Pelt and her football with Charlie Brown, at the last moment he always pulls away and leaves us without knowing who is behind these things and why they do what they do. In some cases he out-and-out misdirects our people into thinking that Democrats are the real problem — not Jewish power — and that Republicans, some of them anyway, are the real solution. He scrupulously and cleverly and rather disgustingly dances around the issue of Jewish/Zionist power. Sometimes he tells us that it’s some shadowy “woke” conspiracy or airheaded “groupthink” trendiness that’s “behind it all.” (Truth be told, we as people need “groupthink.” All peoples need groupthink — that is, thinking of themselves as a group and committing themselves to their group’s survival — in order to even exist at all. Tucker Carlson says that’s a bad thing, promoting some vaguely libertarian strain of populism — or maybe it’s a populist strain of libertarianism; it doesn’t really matter, either one is death for us. So I am not a big fan of Tucker Carlson.

But Carlson went too far for Jonathan Greenblatt and the ADL. And he was hugely popular. So he had to go. And, going against — insanely against, I might add — their own economic interests, the Murdochs fired him. Pleasing Jews is more important, apparently, than billions in revenue.

And it is this same Greenblatt and same ADL that is allowed to give “training courses” to police officers nationwide, telling the officers just who it is who is “dangerous” and who should get especially intense law enforcement scrutiny. It is this same ADL that meets with social media executives — including Elon Musk — and tells them who it is who should have a voice and who should be stifled or silenced. It is this same ADL that tells our national and state and local legislators what laws should be passed and what speech should be banned.

Speaking of pleasing Jews, witness the shocking behavior of Florida governor Ron DeSantis. For the second time in history — and DeSantis did it the first time, too — an American governor has signed a bill into law while in a foreign country. It was a bill supported by the ADL and specifically crafted to make distribution of fliers criticizing Jews into a felony. And guess which country DeSantis was in when he signed it? If you guessed Israel, you’re right. DeSantis, who, like Tucker Carlson, makes a lot of noise in apparent opposition to certain of the most outrageous parts of the Jewish agenda, knows who he has to please. Don’t fool yourself; DeSantis still has ambitions to be a major elite political player. His signing of this flagrantly immoral and illegal restriction on our speech while in Israel is deeply significant: a symbolic bowing to his masters, in a place sacred to his masters, signaling he wants their approval for a “move up” in status, something that only they really decide.

I’ll embed the tweet from neocon Jew Rep. Andy Fine, who said: “made a secret trip to JERUSALEM (!!!) to deliver @GovRonDeSantis HB 269, the strongest antisemitism bill in the United States. To Florida’s Nazi thugs, I have news: attack Jews on their property and you’re going to prison. Never again means never again.” All of this surmounts a picture of DeSantis signing the sacred bill, with two smirking Jews looking on. Do I have to tell you that the bill has nothing to do with “attacking” Jews, but only with distributing literature that criticizes them or exposes their activities?

Some of you may be wondering what all this has to do with Mary Phagan. And who is she, anyway? Well, you need to understand the murder of Mary Phagan in order to understand how we got from the Land of the Free to the point where a greasy, sleazy item like Greenblatt gets to decide what our laws should be and what you can say without getting fired or going to prison.

It all began when 19th-century Americans, woefully unaware of reality when it came to Jews, mistakenly thought that Jews were just another kind of European and let them stream into our country in huge numbers. Jews, knowing they were a separate race and with fanatical racial loyalty, immediately began to organize and acquire power for themselves, especially power over the press and eventually all mass media as they emerged.

Initially, Jews in the southern US adapted themselves to the reality of Jim Crow and positioned themselves publicly as “White” and supportive of White institutions.

But all that changed at high noon on 26 April, 1913, in Atlanta, Georgia.

It happened on the second floor of the National Pencil Company building on Forsyth Street. It was a sweatshop where child laborers, mostly White girls, spent their youth making pencils for the company’s Jewish owners for 60 hours a week and more, earning only pennies an hour.

13-year-old Mary Phagan was one such girl. She came that day to the office to collect her pathetically meager $1.20 pay. There she met the sweatshop’s Jewish boss and stockholder, Leo Frank, in his office on the second floor. Leo Frank was also the president of the Atlanta chapter of the B’nai B’rith, a Jewish organization that would spawn the ADL later that same year.

It was a holiday and no one else was on that entire floor. Frank paid her, and then took her into the factory’s “metal room,” in the rear part of the second floor, as far as possible from the stairway and elevator, and from prying eyes and ears, on the pretext of checking to see if the metal supplies she needed for her work had come in. He closed the doors behind them as they walked.

Near the rear wall, standing in front of a metal lathe next to the toilet entrance, Leo Frank did to Mary Phagan what he, according to numerous witnesses, had often done with his teenage girl employees: He attempted to take sexual liberties with her. She resisted. Frank knocked her down forcibly, hitting her in the eye and striking her head against the unyielding metal lathe, opening a bloody gash that he may or may not have seen at first. While she was stunned, he pulled her garments up above her waist and raped her right on the red-stained floor in front of the toilet, lying in her own flowing blood.

When he was “done,” seeing the blood and doubtlessly realizing his predicament should Mary tell others of his actions, he found a piece of the twine used to pack supplies in his factory, wound it tightly around Mary’s neck, and strangled her to death. He then tore off a piece of her lace underwear, placed it around her neck as if it were a lace necklet and so it covered the marks of the strangling.

He then summoned the factory’s Black sweeper, Jim Conley, to enlist his aid in the moving and, he hoped, the burning of Mary Phagan’s body. Conley knew that Frank liked to “chat” in private with the prettier of his young White employees, as he had kept watch for Frank on several occasions while such “chatting” took place. And, in fact, he was keeping watch for him near the factory’s first-floor entrance at that very moment. Frank told Conley that he had struck the girl and accidentally killed her. The lace “necklet” might have served to conceal the strangling — at least conceal it from Conley. It could never fool police investigators. But, if Conley had burned the body for Frank as planned (as it turned out, he never did), there might never be any police investigators. Conley and Frank moved Mary’s body to the basement.

Frank and his legal team tried to frame the Black night watchman, Newt Lee, for the murder. Among other things, they forged his time card, and planted a fake bloody shirt at his residence. When that framing attempt failed, they tried to frame Jim Conley — and, 111 years later, they’re still trying to frame him. They planted a fake “bloody club” and pay envelope near the place where Conley kept watch for Frank that day. But that fake was exposed, too. The true evidence kept building up, and the proof was overwhelming that Frank was the killer. He was convicted and sentenced to death.

But Frank had something that ordinary defendants, Black or White, never have. He was not an “ordinary citizen.” He was a Jew, a member of the supposedly “chosen people.” He was also an actual official of the Jewish power structure — the head of Atlanta’s division of the B’nai B’rith. He had the already massive power, money, media ownership, and political influence of the organized Jewish community nationwide behind him. They refused to let the verdict stand. They funded a multimillion-dollar legal and PR campaign to get him a new trial, to make millions of gullible people believe he was innocent and a saintlike “victim of anti-Semitism,” and to get his sentence commuted. They were only partially successful. All his numerous and expensive appeals, which went all the way up to the US Supreme Court, failed. And the death sentence was carried out by an outraged citizenry after a corrupt governor commuted it. The Jews did fool a great number of Americans about Frank, however.

And the Frank case galvanized Jews to see heritage Americans as their enemies. The Leo Frank case was not only the first time the Jewish power structure flexed its muscles so openly to change public opinion and to get what it wanted from the political and legal systems. It was also when they decided that their alliance with White people was at an end. From that day forward, and intensifying greatly after World War 2, the Jews have been ramping up a (slighty) covert war on White people at the very same time that they made overt war on Arabs and others in the Middle East.

Everything else flows from that day. What that Jew pervert did to Mary Phagan on the metal room floor that day 111 years ago this week led directly to Jonathan Greenblatt telling you what you can and cannot say today — led directly, in fact, to the founding of the ADL just a few months after Mary Phagan breathed her last.

And now, as Paul Harvey used to say, you know the rest of the story.

***

Source: based on an article at National Vanguard

by Scott Aaronson

IT MAY WELL BE the greatest murder mystery of all time. Some assert that the Mary Phagan murder case is solved, but those who so assert are of two different and mutually exclusive camps. And those two camps still stand diametrically opposed to this day, four generations later.

The case aroused the outrage and ire and vengeance of two great communities. One, the Jewish community, feel overwhelmingly today, and felt to a lesser but still substantial extent in 1913, that Leo Frank was tried and condemned simply because he was a Jew. They believe that Leo Frank is so obviously innocent that he never would have been tried had it not been for endemic anti-Semitism in 1913 Atlanta. And they have been remarkably effective in making  Southern anti-Semitism the leitmotif of virtually all drama, documentary, and other remembrance of this case for the last half century. The other, the largely Christian Southern gentile community, believed overwhelmingly in 1913 — and to an unknown but doubtlessly  large degree still believes today — that justice was done when all the jurors, and every appeals court in the land including the Supreme Court of the United States, after a monumental and impressively-funded defense, agreed that Leo Frank was fairly tried and convicted for the murder of Mary Phagan. And it must rankle Southerners almost beyond words to be accused of anti-Semitism, when no Christian community anywhere on earth has so respected and welcomed Jews, has so openly acknowledged its spiritual roots in Judaism, or has so enthusiastically supported the Jewish state of Israel.

It all begins with Mary Phagan, a sweet and lovely 13-year-old girl on the threshold of womanhood. She was loved and treasured by those who knew her well. When her all-too-real tragedy began, she had just played the part of Sleeping Beauty in a church play (and, her family tells us, was unable to stop giggling during the rehearsals of the kissing scene). Barely a teenager, she was nevertheless providing support to her family – at the wage rate of seven and a half cents an hour (see Gannt testimony, coroner’s inquest) – working as a child laborer in the sweatshop of Atlanta’s National Pencil Company.

Late on Saturday morning, April 26, 1913, brightly dressed for the parade and festivities that were to take place that afternoon to celebrate Confederate Memorial Day, Mary Phagan went to pick up her pay of $1.20 from factory superintendent and part-owner Leo Frank. Frank was a businessman who was so well-respected in Atlanta’s very successful Jewish community that, at the age of 29, he had become the president of the local chapter of B’nai B’rith.

Mary Phagan never made it to the parade. Her bloody body was found at three o’clock the next morning in the factory basement, brutally used, beaten, and strangled to death. The sudden end of Mary Phagan’s brief life shocked Atlanta, then the entire South, and ultimately the entire nation.

Her death became the center of intense public outrage and interest, and Frank was charged with her murder. Jewish businessmen, publishers, and organizations from all over the country made Frank’s defense a cause célèbre, and the large sums donated enabled Frank to procure the most respected lawyers in the state and even to appeal his case to the highest court in the land. But to little avail – ultimately Leo Frank was found guilty of the unspeakable killing of little Mary, and his appeals were rejected by every court that heard them.

Frank was sentenced to hang, to much public satisfaction. But in 1915 John Slaton, the state’s outgoing governor, under tremendous pressure from both sides, made the decision during the last moments of his administration to commute Frank’s sentence to life in prison – despite the fact the he, Slaton, was a senior partner in the law firm that defended Frank.

Outraged by what they saw as corruption and a miscarriage of justice, a group comprising some of the region’s leading citizens laid careful plans to abduct Frank from his prison cell and carry out the jury’s original sentence of hanging – and they did so, lynching him not far from Mary Phagan’s home.

It is this second horrific death by strangulation – Leo Frank’s – that occupies the public mind today. Frank, not Mary Phagan, is the locus of tragedy, of moral lessons, of outrage and mourning. Mary Phagan’s life, and the horrors she endured in her last moments, are almost forgotten except as a backdrop for Frank’s persecution and death at the hands of alleged anti-Semites. Her tragedy, and her family’s grief and outcry for justice, have been turned into little more than footnotes.

I said there were three strangling deaths. The third is the strangling to death of the truth. Much of the real history of this case, and the actual, primary evidence that was brought to light at the time, is almost unknown today – at least to that vast majority who consume the academic works, popular dramatizations, articles, and books that have addressed the subject of Leo Frank in recent decades. Instead of real history, investigated and recounted with a deep commitment to objectivity, we are given a simplistic, moralistic narrative of an obviously innocent Leo Frank victimized by bigoted anti-Semites who subjected him to a sham trial and an horrific lynching – with the added fillip that the undoubted killer was an African-American, Jim Conley, who was never prosecuted because anti-Semitic fervor demanded Frank’s blood. This narrative is such an imposture that not even the honorable supporters of Leo Frank in 1913, were they alive today, would recognize or endorse it. It is a farrago of emotional blackmail, half-truths, omissions, and outright hoaxes. I write so that the readers and students of today can at long last see that, whatever prejudices there may have been in 1913 Atlanta, those that prevail in the mediasphere of the early 21st century are far worse.

This sham history will collapse, sooner or later, as new generations of investigators rediscover the evidence that has been brushed under the rug in recent years. Young historians, some of them not yet born, will make their reputations and earn their doctorates exposing the hoaxes that now seem to buttress (but will ultimately undermine) the false narrative.

Will this rediscovery of the truth cause a backlash of real anti-Semitism against Southern Jews or Jews in general? I think not. Just because a few soi-disant leaders, cranks, haters, and self-promoters palmed off their paranoiac vision of the Frank case on a generation is no reason for a real vendetta. I intend to show that a middle path that respects truth above ethnic and religious loyalty is needed, and Jewish voices should, I hope, be prominent in leading the way if we are to avoid another swing of the knife-edged pendulum of hate.

One of the most remarkable things I discovered when writing about this case was that many of the original articles about this case – even major ones – and affidavits, sworn statements, and utterances of great import from the central participants in the case, were not available online, not searchable, not findable, not even readable. That is, until a courageous man named Mark Cohen, almost 100 years after the fact, scanned in and uploaded nearly all the relevant contemporary newspapers, magazines, and surviving trial materials to his Web site, leofrank.org. I deeply appreciate Mr. Cohen’s efforts in doing this service for us, for our posterity, and for history. (I do not, however, endorse all of Mr. Cohen’s theories of, or conclusions about, this case.) It was a monumental effort that must have taken years. Even then, though, the material was largely not searchable because most of the fragile, faded papers from which the uploaded PDF files had been made were not of good enough quality to allow them to be turned into text using OCR technology. So, to provide the most important evidence to you, the reader, I found myself retyping – and, as I typed, reliving – the events of 100 years ago exactly as they were reported at the time. In recent years, another independent Leo Frank archive, located at leofrank.info, took on the task of transcribing all the relevant contemporary articles on this case, a monumental project that is still ongoing.

All that was available to the researcher — until very recently — about the Frank case, and to the reader and student, was practically all derivative writing, mostly decades or a century removed from the events, and with minuscule exceptions all slavishly devoted to the received narrative of Frank’s absolute innocence and pervasive Southern anti-Semitism.

For many, the evidence against Leo Frank could not pass the test of “beyond a reasonable doubt.” I am not sure that I could have authorized the opening of the trap door beneath him myself. But, to the jury which tried him, it did pass that test. The judge rightly charged the jury to throw aside all preconceptions and prejudices and judge the case on the evidence alone. We should do the same.

If we cannot open our eyes to see what the people of that time and place saw, if we dare not examine the evidence for ourselves and throw aside the distorting lens of the media’s current depiction of the case, then we are indulging ourselves in feel-good (or, for many, feel-bad) fiction. If we do that in the Frank case – a case in which the received narrative is one of blood libel against the people of the South, against an entire people and culture – we have abandoned responsibility for our children’s future and any shred of honor we might once have possessed.

I have spent most of my life in the South, and learned much from its people. All of us, Jew and Gentile, black and white, deserve better. We should respect the truth above all. Lying to right a perceived wrong is compounding the wrong, prolonging and augmenting the hate we claim to oppose.

* * *

The Crime: Mary Phagan’s Death by Strangling

ON SATURDAY morning at 11:30AM, April 26, 1913 Mary Phagan ate a poor girl’s lunch of bread and boiled cabbage and said goodbye to her mother for the last time. Dressed for parade-watching (for this was Confederate Memorial Day) in a lavender dress, ribbon-bedecked hat, and parasol, she left her home in hardscrabble working-class Bellwood at 11:45, and caught the streetcar for downtown Atlanta.

Before the festivities, though, she stopped to see Superintendent Leo M. Frank at the National Pencil Company and pick up from him her $1.20 pay for the one day she had worked there during the previous week.

She had been laid off for most of that week because the material needed for the tipping department in the metal room, where she worked, had been late in arriving.

She entered the grim and massive four-story Victorian building a few minutes after noon, and proceeded up the stairs to the second floor, where both Leo Frank’s office and – more than a hundred feet further back – her own department were located. By all accounts, she did not know that Jim Conley, the company’s African-American sweeper, was sitting in the shadows on the first floor behind the staircase, near the elevator and the “scuttle hole” ladder that led to the basement. Strangely, even though it was his day off,  and even though the factory superintendent was around, Conley was there, partly hidden by darkness but not stealthily concealed, doing no work – drawing no pay – and apparently doing nothing but watching.

As Conley watched, a few moments later, at 12:05, one of the factory’s other working girls, 14-year-old Monteen Stover, arrived to collect her pay. She also walked up those same steps, also failed to notice Jim Conley, and also entered Leo Frank’s office. Mary had not left. But Monteen found no one there. Frank’s office was in two sections, an outer office and an inner office. Looking for him, Monteen saw that the outer office was empty, so she went into the inner office, and saw that it was empty too.

She looked down the hall toward the rows of factory machinery. There was nothing but motionless silence. So she decided to wait. She waited a full five minutes, according to the office clock. She saw and heard no one. Shortly after 12:10 she left by the same route she came, again encountering not a single person. (The exact timing of Mary Phagan’s visit was disputed later, with some Frank partisans insisting that Monteen arrived before Mary. Frank himself stated on April 28 of Mary that “She came in between 12:05 and 12:10, maybe 12:07, to get her pay envelope, her salary.” Clocks and watches in 1913 could easily be off by several minutes. Nevertheless, it appears clear that Monteen Stover failed to find Frank, or anyone, in his office at around the time that Mary was there. Frank told detectives that he never left his office from noon to 12:45.)

After one o’clock, Leo Frank left to go home for lunch. His wife and mother-in-law were waiting in their best finery, ready to go to Atlanta’s opulent opera house, where New York’s Metropolitan Opera was on tour, presenting a matinee performance of Lucia di Lammermoor. After eating, Frank returned to the factory while not far away the somber, intoxicating strains of Donizetti’s prelude wafted over the wealthy Atlantans in their temple of culture, and while the common folk readied themselves to salute the aging heroes in grey who were marching together, perhaps for the last time in their lives.

Almost no one knew it at the time, but by one o’clock one young life was already over. For her there would never again be parades, or music, or kisses, or flowers, or children, or love. Mary Phagan never left the National Pencil Company alive. Abused, beaten, and strangled by a rough cord pulled so tightly that it had embedded itself deeply in her girlish neck and made her tongue protrude more than an inch from her mouth, Mary Phagan lay dead, dumped in the dirt and shavings of the pencil company basement, her once-bright eyes now sightless and still as she lay before the gaping maw of the furnace where the factory trash was burned.

*  *  *

ON FRIDAY, the day before the murder, Leo Frank had told the factory’s African-American night watchman, Newt Lee, to come to work Saturday afternoon at four, as Frank wanted to leave around four so he could attend a baseball game with his brother-in-law Mr. Ursenbach. But upon arriving at four, Lee said that Frank appeared extremely nervous and insisted that Lee leave the factory and “have a good time” somewhere else and return at six. When Lee suggested he might instead just sleep for a couple of hours on the premises, Frank rejected the suggestion, repeating that Lee should depart for two hours.

Frank again seemed very nervous when Lee returned at six, and even visibly jumped back when he noticed that a former employee named Gantt had arrived about the same time as Lee. Frank was to claim that this was because Gantt was a large man and had in fact been fired by Frank not long before. Frank would also later state, however, that he believed that Gantt was close to Mary Phagan and so his visit might have been interpreted as being to inquire about her whereabouts.

Newt Lee made his rounds as usual that night, but he didn’t go all the way into the basement until around three in the morning. There he discovered the lifeless body of Mary Phagan. He tried and failed to reach Leo Frank by telephone. He then called the police.

Lee described the events of that afternoon and night to detectives, beginning with his first arrival at the factory:

The front door was not locked. I pushed it open, went on in and got to the double door there… The front door had always been unlocked on previous Saturday afternoons. After you go inside and come up about middle ways of the steps, there are some double doors there. It was locked on Saturday when I got there. Have never found it that way before. I took my key and unlocked it. When I went upstairs I had a sack of bananas and I stood to the left of that desk like I do every Saturday. I says like I always do “Alright Mr. Frank” and he come bustling out of his office. He had never done that before. He always called me when he wanted to tell me anything and said, “Step here a minute, Newt.” This time he came up rubbing his hands and says, “Newt, I am sorry that I had you come so soon, you could have been at home sleeping, I tell you what you do, you go out in town and have a good time.” He had never let me off before that. I could have laid down in the shipping room and gone to sleep, and I told him that. He says, “You needs to have a good time. You go downtown, stay an hour and a half, and come back your usual time at six o’clock.” I then went out the door and stayed [out] until about four minutes to six. When I came back the doors were unlocked just as I left them and I went and says, “Alright, Mr. Frank,” and he says, “What time is it?” and I says, “It lacks two minutes of six.” He says, “Don’t punch yet [a reference to the company’s time clock – Ed.], there is a few worked today and I want to change the slip.” It took him twice as long this time than it did the other times I saw him fix it. He fumbled putting it in, while I held the lever for him and I think he made some remark about he was not used to putting it in. When Mr. Frank put the tape in I punched and I went downstairs.

While I was down there Mr. Gantt came from across the street from the beer saloon and says, “Newt, I got a pair of old shoes that I want to get upstairs to have fixed.” I says, “I ain’t allowed to let anybody in here after six o’clock.” About that time Mr. Frank come bustling out of the door and run into Gantt unexpected and he jumped back frightened. Gantt says, “I got a pair of old shoes upstairs, have you any objection to my getting them?” Frank says, “I don’t think they are up there; I think I saw the boy sweep some up in the trash the other day.” Mr. Gantt asked him what sort they were and Mr. Frank says “tans.” Gantt says, “Well, I had a pair of black ones too.” Frank says, “Well, I don’t know,” and he dropped his head down just so. Then he raised his head and says, “Newt, go with him and stay with him and help him find them,” and I went up there with Mr. Gantt and found them in the shipping room, two pair, the tans and the black ones.

Not long after, Frank did something that, according to Lee, he had never done before:

Mr. Frank phoned me that night about an hour after he left, it was sometime after seven o’clock. He says, “How is everything?” and I says, “Everything is all right so far as I know,” and he says “Goodbye.”

…There is a light in the basement down there at the foot of the ladder. He told me to keep that burning all the time. It has two little chains to it to turn on and turn off the gas. When I got there on making my rounds at seven o’clock on the 26th of April, it was burning just as low as you could turn it, like a lightning bug. I left it Saturday morning burning bright. I made my rounds regularly every half hour Saturday night. I punched on the hour and punched on the half and I made all my punches. The elevator doors on the street floor and office floor were closed when I got there on Saturday. They were fastened down just like we fasten them down every other night. When three o’clock came I went down the basement and when I went down and got ready to come back I discovered the body there. I went down to the toilet and when I got through I looked at the dust bin back to the door to see how the door was and it being dark I picked up my lantern and went there and I saw something laying there which I thought some of the boys had put there to scare me, then I got out of there. I got up the ladder and called up the police station. It was after three o’clock… I tried to get Mr. Frank on the telephone and was still trying …I guess I was trying about eight minutes.

Eventually Newt Lee gave up on Frank and called the police. When the officers arrived and were directed down the ladder to the basement by Lee, they discovered the mysterious handwritten “death notes” in the sawdust near the body. These notes purported to be written by Mary Phagan herself, but were later proven not to be so. They seemed the work of someone barely literate, and the language used was similar to Southern African-American dialect. They read:

Mam that negro hire down here did this i went to make water and he push me doun that hole a long tall negro black that hoo it was long sleam tall negro i wright while play with me.

he said he wood love me and land doun play like night witch did it but that long tall black negro did buy his slef.

When the notes were read out loud in the presence of Lee, he exclaimed “that’s me, boss” (or words to that effect; the exact phrase was disputed) when the words “night witch” were reached, Lee obviously assuming that “night watch” – as in “night watchman,” as we would say – was what was really meant. Added to the facts that Lee was a “long slim tall negro” and dark complected (“negro black”), the notes said such a person did the deed “by his self.” It did appear that the writer of the notes was trying to implicate Lee.

Detectives also found a bloody handkerchief ten feet away, one shoe, and some sheets of paper and pencils. Oddly, Mary’s hat and parasol had apparently been tossed in the bottom of the elevator shaft. Along with a quantity of miscellaneous trash, some human excrement was also found in the shaft, which was crushed and caused a stench when the detectives rode the car down later in the day. There were marks indicating Mary’s body had been dragged across the basement floor, and her bloody, bruised face was smeared with dirt and cinders. The dragging marks began at the elevator shaft.

Lee was an obvious suspect and was immediately arrested — but was later shown to be completely innocent — and suspicion of him grew when someone, likely someone associated with Frank, planted a fake bloody shirt at his home, and when Frank himself changed his statement and claimed that punches were missing from Lee’s time card.

* * *

Christianity, Anti-Semitism, and the American South: Background to the Leo Frank Case

GEORGIA, as a part of the South, is a place where, though freethinkers are certainly not unknown, the vast majority of the population is deeply committed to Christianity — largely Protestant, fundamentalist Christianity. One’s personal “walk with Jesus” is taken very seriously here, and the religion informs almost every aspect of private, family, and public life. The fundamentalist worldview is dominant, as it is throughout the South, which, along with a few border states, is not called the “Bible Belt” for nothing. This was doubly true in 1913.

One of the core beliefs of fundamentalism is literalism, a belief that every word of the scriptures was directly inspired by God and is literally true. The position of the average Georgian on the Bible is expressed in the saying, common in the South, “God said it. I believe it. That settles it.” The history in the Bible is, therefore, accurate, including God’s special preference for the Jews as His people, an especially holy people. The prophetic visions of the Bible are, therefore, infallible, including the centrality of Israel and its people to God’s plan for heaven and earth. The law set down in scripture is, therefore, to be obeyed absolutely, including its commands to honor and bless God’s Chosen. The Old Testament —  the entirety of which is by, about, and for Jews — is not glossed over or minimized by fundamentalists, as it is by some Christian denominations. It is God’s word; it is absolute truth no less than the New Testament. And Jehovah, the Jewish God of the Old Testament, is to fundamentalists the one and only God.

Most important of all to fundamentalist Christians, Jesus was born a Jew, spoke in the synagogues, and was in fact the prophesied Jewish Messiah. The Jewish faith, the Jewish prophets, and the Jewish people themselves were the sources from which Christ came and without which Christ could never have existed.

It is the South that is the center of Christian Zionism. Many a sermon and many a ministry in the South have as their basis Genesis 12:3, in which God says of the Jews: “I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee.”

In 1909, four years before Mary Phagan’s murder, the first edition of the Scofield Reference Bible was published by Cyrus Scofield. It was innovative in that explanations of, and details about, the Biblical texts were printed in a column alongside the actual verses. Scofield’s Bible was tremendously popular and influential in fundamentalist circles and remains so to this day. Scofield wrote in his note to Genesis 12:3:

It has invariably fared ill with the people who have persecuted the Jew – well with those who have protected him. The future will still more remarkably prove this principle.

In subsequent editions Scofield’s followers expanded the note, adding “For a nation to commit the sin of anti-Semitism brings inevitable judgment.”

Harry Golden reported in the American Jewish Committee’s magazine Commentary that, shortly after the establishment of the Jewish state, “Bonds for Israel” salesmen in the South would purposely seek out Christians, since they were almost all enthusiastically pro-Zionist. If asked about their reasons for supporting Zionism, a typical fundamentalist Christian response was “It’s in the book!” — meaning, of course, the Bible. Such was the dominant Southern Christian position, and this attitude toward Jews cannot have materialized suddenly in 1948, nor even in the one generation or so from Leo Frank’s trial to that date. If anything, Christian-Jewish relations were better at the inception of the Frank case than afterward, as the case left scars that are yet to be fully healed.

Those who posit a pervasive anti-Semitism in Georgia a century ago can point to a few obscure pamphlets and some of Tom Watson’s populist diatribes (though Watson himself disclaimed anti-Semitism and a few years later attacked Henry Ford for his racial condemnation of Jews). But it seems quite unlikely that any major Southern publication could match the New York Tribune editorial of 1882, which stated of Jews, “There must be some other cause than their religion which makes these people dreaded as permanent inhabitants by every country to which they come.” One is entitled to doubt that any distinguished Southern journal would have dared to reprint the Boston Saturday Evening Gazette editorial of 1879 which remarked about Jews that “It is strange that a nation which boasts so many good traits should be so obnoxious.” Additionally, as far as is known, Atlanta never had the “honor” of having a branch of the “American Anti-Semitic Association” within its borders, as Brooklyn, New York did in 1896.

In the 1890s, it was not in Marietta, Georgia, but in Saratoga Springs, New York where hoteliers famously posted signs reading “No Jews or Dogs Admitted Here.” In that crucible of Southern identity, the Civil War, Southerners made a Jew their Secretary of the Treasury in the person of Judah P. Benjamin, while the North in the person of Ulysses S. Grant physically expelled all Jews from all areas under his control, which included large parts of Kentucky, Mississippi, and Tennessee, cruelly demanding in a time of war and in an age of slow transportation that they be gone from this huge territory “within 24 hours.”

After the prolonged political battle of many New York Jews against Tammany Hall in New York City, in 1901 the city’s corrupt police force retaliated by attacking a Jewish funeral procession, billy clubs flailing. Nothing even remotely similar has been reported about the Atlanta of that era; in fact, knowing what we know about Southern-Jewish relations, it seems utterly inconceivable.

John Higham, in his “Social Discrmination Against Jews 1830 – 1930,” a work commissioned by the American Jewish Committee, called the South “historically the section least inclined to ostracize Jews,” and drew attention to the “striking Southern situation” of almost no discrimination against Jews there. True, Jewish-Gentile relations had somewhat declined there by the mid-twentieth century, and the massive campaign during the Frank appeals to paint his prosecution, and the South generally, as anti-Semitic — and the eventual creation of the Anti-Defamation League in the wake of Frank’s death — played their part in this change. The revived 20th-century Ku Klux Klan, inspired in part by the otherwise invisible and perhaps even nonexistent group that took responsibility for Leo Frank’s lynching, the Knights of Mary Phagan, was quite different from the original Klan: It took an overt and aggressive anti-Jewish position.

But the aftermath of the Frank trial had no part, of course, in the attitudes of the people of Atlanta on the day Mary Phagan was murdered. All things considered, the South in general and Atlanta in particular seem to have been, if anything, safe havens for Jews where they might escape from the anti-Semitism that was rampant around the beginning of the last century.

*  *  *

ATLANTA was not without real prejudices, though. The transformation of the South from an agrarian economy into an industrial one, with all its attendant evils, such as child labor, was the cause of passionate outcries for reform. The businessman, especially the industrialist, was not always looked upon with favor.

With industrialization came Northerners – often rich Northerners – who were commonly perceived as lording it over poor Southerners from illustrious family lines who, it was widely thought, ought to have been their social superiors. And the scars of the Civil War still ran deep. The war, and the sometimes brutal “Reconstruction,” was still within the living memory of the older generation. Many Atlantans of 1913 had personally experienced the killing of loved ones, defeat, exploitation, rape, poverty, hunger, dispossession, disenfranchisement, military dictatorship, and worse. The city itself had even been deliberately set afire by Union forces during the war. Though young Georgians had not experienced such horrors, they all had parents or other loved ones who had.

Southerners in 1861 had enough sense of peoplehood to separate themselves from the Union. The humiliating defeat of 1865 and the decade-long federal occupation had made that sense of peoplehood – of being a people apart, an oppressed nation within a nation – even stronger. And it bred a sense of distrust of authority, of resistance to established power, of direct vengeance on wrongdoers when the System failed to act, that suffused the very air of the South, from the sleepiest hamlet to the vibrant, burgeoning, modern, and industrial Atlanta that was rapidly arising from the ashes.

The African-Americans of the South were yet another nation within a nation. Freed by Lincoln’s decree during the war, and briefly ascendent during Reconstruction when almost the entire Southern white population was disenfranchised, black people were quickly relegated to second class citizenship when self-government was restored to the former Confederacy. Almost all of them poorly educated and in poverty, and viewed as impulsive and potentially violent, they were the first to be suspected  – and, almost universally unable to employ competent counsel – the most likely to be convicted of violent crimes. Even worse for them, if it was popularly perceived among the white community that an African-American was using a lawyer or the “letter of the law” to avoid responsibility for a crime, or if authorities were simply too insistent that a black man or woman had legal rights that ought to be respected when “everybody knew” he or she was guilty, an abduction and an extra-legal hanging – a lynching – was often the result.

“Lynch law,” as it came to be called, often targeted African-Americans, though some “no account” Southern whites were its victims too. The lynching of a Jew, though – and lynching would ultimately be Leo Frank’s fate – was, as far as I have been able to determine, unheard of.

The “color line” in the South (and, in fact, in some parts of the North as well) forbade sexual contact or marriage between the races, and the rule ran far deeper than a mere written law. The violation of a white girl or woman by a black man was viewed as especially heinous and the man even suspected of such an act, to say nothing of one convicted of such an act, especially if the woman was harmed or killed, was probably not long for this earth.

In the race-conscious South of 1913, Jews were considered white. In fact, in the newspapers of Atlanta before, during, and after the trial of Leo Frank for the murder of Mary Phagan, Frank was referred to as a “white man” on innumerable occasions by reporters, witnesses, African-Americans, fellow Jews, pro-Frank partisans, and anti-Frank polemicists. Jews, furthermore, were not known for violent acts or crimes, nor feared as violators of white women. If anything, they were seen as an unusually industrious, intelligent, and law-abiding segment of society, even if they were a bit peculiar in their religious views. Marriage between Jews and Christians might have raised a few eyebrows in both communities – just as did intermarriage between members of widely different Christian denominations – but it was far from unknown, and such couples were not ostracized. In fact, Leo Frank’s own brother-in-law, Mr. Ursenbach, with whom he canceled an appointment to see a baseball game on the day Mary Phagan was killed, was a Christian.

If there was prejudice against Leo Frank in 1913 Atlanta, it was almost certainly not because he was a Jew. He was, however, a capitalist, a business owner, a manager, an employer of child labor, and a Northerner with an Ivy League education. He also came to be known during the course of the trial as sexually profligate. These facts probably did count against him.

* * *

Source: Author

by Steve Voes

THIS INFORMATION COMES WITH permission directly from an insider source who has given me reliable information in the past, whose name I absolutely must keep confidential and who has been keeping me abreast of developments of this nature.

My government insider associate has informed me that Leo Frank, the Atlanta B’nai B’rith president who strangled little Mary Phagan, a 13-year-old White girl who worked in his factory, to death after sexually assaulting her there, will be “exonerated” in 2019. This has been a goal of organized Jews for over a century.

The fix is in. A “deal” has been made between Jews — and the Black establishment that now nominally rules once-White Atlanta — and a remnant of pathetic, truckling, corrupt White officials.

Previously, the strong evidence against Frank, and the once-proud tradition of honor among Southern Whites, made exoneration impossible and it was repeatedly rejected despite the strongest pressure from Jews.

Blacks, too, had previously been resistant to exonerating Frank, and it was a Black nationalist group, the Nation of Islam, which had published one of the best books on the Frank case, The Lynching of a Guilty Man, in 2016 (which was made into an audio book by the American Mercury). Many Blacks also strongly resented the efforts of the pro-Frank forces, which included the ADL, to successively frame two innocent Black men, Newt Lee and James Conley, for the crime. The effort to frame Conley, who died nearly 60 years ago, continues even today.

Inside information indicates that corrupt Black leaders have been given a deal in which a new “Conviction Integrity Unit” will first exonerate Frank — the real purpose of the unit — and then later may be used to reverse convictions of specially-favored Blacks.

The corrupt White leaders who acquiesced in the deal of course neither asked for nor received anything on behalf of the White community, whom they hate and do not represent. They possibly received some paltry pieces of silver for themselves — though we can’t be sure of that, since for many White trucklers, particularly ones from the South, serving and obeying Jews is enough of a reward in itself.

In late 2018, not long after the re-dedication of the Leo Frank Lynching Historical Marker at Roswell Road in Marietta, Ga., Dale Schwartz and the Anti-Defamation League’s legal team accelerated the push for the creation of a clandestine rubber-stamp committee which would do nothing less than exonerate Leo Frank.

There are other Jewish activists groups and individuals behind this as well, but intel is still being gathered (so that info will have to wait). The effort to get Leo Frank exonerated really took shape in the 1980s and only subsided in 1986 with an embarrassing “posthumous pardon” which did not officially absolve Leo Frank of the ghoulish sex-murder he committed in 1913. The pardon did, however, give Leo Frank his civil rights back, like the right to vote (can dead people vote 70 years later?), own a firearm (God forbid his skeleton should pick up some kind of scary weapon!), and run for office (on the creepy Joe Biden ticket?). It’s unfortunate that the guilty dead can’t enjoy it when they are given their civil rights back, but such is life.

One of the Loudest Living Voices in Metro Atlanta for Leo Frank’s Exoneration

Rabbi Steven Lebow of Marietta’s Temple Kol Emeth, who moved to the area from Fort Lauderdale, Florida in the mid-1980s, has been one of the loudest voices for reversing Leo Frank’s conviction (Lebow hung two plaques on a building which was near the lynching site, but the building had to be condemned for road expansion), and he is secretly head-over-heels excited about the guaranteed forthcoming exoneration. Before he found out about the newly-pending 2019 exoneration, Rabbi Lebow had been very frustrated, since the 1986 posthumous pardon Leo Frank, because it did not overturn Frank’s conviction and Frank was still officially recognized as the guilty culprit. He never gave up on his mission to convince everyone Leo Frank was innocent, even if the evidence couldn’t back up his claim. To him this was the “emotional truth” where facts don’t matter.

Failed Attempt by Rabbi Lebow to Get a Declaration from Georgia Government of Leo Frank’s Innocence

In 2015, Lebow was able to form a “Leo Frank was innocent” action A-team, made up of prominent members of the greater Atlanta community, activist judges (African-American Former Ga. Supreme Court Justice Leah Ward Sears, Former Georgia Supreme Court Chief Justice Norman Fletcher, and Cobb County Superior Court Chief Judge J. Stephen Schuster), Assistant DA Van Pearlberg, and ADL Lawyer Dale Schwartz. They held rallies and gave speeches at Lebow’s packed synagogue (hundreds showed up) and unilaterally petitioned then-Governor Nathan Deal, but he quietly refused to state Frank was innocent, taking the wind out of the sails of Lebow’s big dog-and-pony show. The Georgia Congressional Assembly did not propose any resolution to announce to the world that the serial pedophile and sex killer Leo Frank was innocent, either. The whole thing turned out to be an expensive circus.

Rabbi Lebow had funded billboards around town to declare Frank was innocent. Lebow had gaudy mustard-yellow T-shirts made up emblazoned with Leo Frank’s face in gray and the message “DINDU NUFFIN” — or something similar — emblazoned on them. To keep the parched throats of the attendees nice and quenched, he handed out dozens of custom-branded plastic bottles of Coca-Cola which had the words, “Leo Frank was innocent” on them. What a great way to promote such a lofty movement with extra-sugary teeth-rotting soda pop. Because nothing says “Leo Frank was innocent” better than diabetes and an expensive dental bill.

Leo Frank Exoneration Insiders

Many Georgia Jewish leaders who are “in the know” are keeping the preordained outcome hush-hush and are ordering (more like cracking the whip on) the DA Paul Howard to ensure the exoneration is announced on or before August 17, 2019 — this way they can pre-contract with all the major media companies to dovetail the jubilant news together with the major significance of Leo Frank’s 104th lynching anniversary. The members of this cabal are working for maximum media exposure and guerilla marketing, because if they can couple the exoneration directly with the lynching anniversary, or release the news just before the lynching anniversary, the story will “go viral” and have the maximum effect on the dull Whites who still watch TV and vote in the rigged US elections.

There is also some benefit to releasing the predetermined conclusion a little bit early, maybe a week. Now everyone’s on pins and needles, waiting with breathless anticipation for Paul Howard’s DA office to hurry up with producing the official “reasoning” — so the pre-announcement partying can begin all the sooner. Between now and then, it’s going to be raining champagne bottle corks and foamy fountains will be overflowing every kind of glass vessel; I can hear the cheers, Mazel Tov, L’Chaim, to Health! The whole circus is going to be ugly.

ADL, AJF, AJC

They finally found a very willing Atlanta DA (District Attorney) in Paul Howard to spearhead the “Conviction Integrity Unit” (a name Orwell would have loved) which has a predetermined mission to rule that the outcome of the Leo Frank trial in 1913 was “invalid.” The “unit” will also give us a hog-trough full of specious “reasoning” on how they came up with their preconceived decision, which will be repeated by the Jewish-controlled media every April and every August until the Revolution comes. I hear it’s going to play up “mob terrorism” and “anti-Semitism,” omit or twist the evidence against Frank, and attack the court proceedings as “unfair.” By weaving in other criminal cases to “examine impartially,” it blunts the fact that the committee was created specifically because of the Leo Frank case. A dirty, dirty affair, but one most appropriate and expected in the clownish death chamber the Jews have made of America.

Armed with the true lay of the land, you can read the following article by the Atlanta Jewish Times with a clear understanding.

* * *

Appendix

Leo Frank Gets “Second Look”
(Atlanta Jewish Times, editorial comment added by National Vanguard)

SPEAKING to reporters at the Fulton County Courthouse, former Georgia Gov. Roy Barnes [a long-time servant of Jewish interests in Georgia, who has uncritically and fanatically pushed for the exoneration of Jewish sex-killer Frank — Ed.] credited Rabbi Steve Lebow of Temple Kol Emeth with telling him, “There is no statute of limitations on doing the right thing.”

Throughout his 33 years at the Marietta synagogue, Lebow has been a leading voice in the effort to exonerate Leo Frank for his 1913 murder conviction. And in Barnes, he has an influential ally, who persuaded Fulton County District Attorney Paul L. Howard, Jr., to bring Frank’s case before a newly created “Conviction Integrity Unit.” [That is, “Jewish Money and Deal-making Injustice Unit” — Ed.]

Barnes, who will be an adviser to the unit, stood to Howard’s right on May 7 as the district attorney explained that the Frank case fit the fourth of four criteria for re-examination – cases that are in the “interest of justice.”

Among the other cases to be studied is that of Wayne Williams, who was convicted in 1982 of killing two men and is serving life sentences in the state prison but was suspected by police in nearly two dozen of the 1979-81 “missing and murdered children” cases. [Both the “liberal” and Black establishments were salivating to convict a White man of these murders, and were visibly crestfallen when the killer turned out to be Black. A deal has obviously been cut between corrupt Blacks, corrupt leftist Whites, and Jews, in which each will get something they want in return for acquiescing in framing a long-dead Black man, Jim Conley, for the sex killing of Mary Phagan actually committed by B’nai B’rith officer Leo Frank. — Ed.]

“The CIU will review cases in which there is new factual, physical, or forensic evidence. The unit will also review cases in which there is relevant evidence that went untested at the time of trial or some other new evidence that a person was wrongly convicted,” Howard said.

He also mentioned that his office has record of the 37 people who, according to the Equal Justice Initiative, were lynched in Fulton County between 1877 and 1950. [Part of this outrageous, immoral, and illegal “deal” may be vague promises that Black lynching victims can be “officially exonerated” too. — Ed.]

Frank, an Ivy League-educated Jew from New York, was convicted and sentenced to death for the April 26, 1913, strangling death of 13-year-old Mary Phagan at the downtown Atlanta factory of the National Pencil Company, where he was the director. Frank was found guilty in large measure based on testimony by Jim Conley, an African American janitor at the factory, who, according to a former factory employee who came forward in 1982, was seen carrying Phagan’s body. [Which makes no difference in Frank’s guilt whatsoever — as this article fails to tell you: Conley freely admitted carrying the body at the request of Frank. Leo Frank also told Conley he had killed the girl, pretending it was an accident and hiding the evidence of strangling from Conley with a piece of Mary’s lace undergarments. — Ed.]

Barnes recalled newspaper reports that as jurors walked to the courthouse from the Kimball House, where they were sequestered, a mob chanted “Hang the Jew or we’ll hang you.” [This is a long-discredited hoax, which has been exposed countless times. Nothing like that happened, and if it had, Frank’s top-drawer attorneys would have called, and called successfully, for an immediate mistrial — which they never did. — Ed.]

The Supreme Court of the United States rejected Frank’s appeals, but on June 21, 1915, Gov. John Slaton, who had developed doubts about Frank’s guilt, commuted the sentence to life in prison. On the night of Aug. 16, members of an enraged confederacy of Cobb County men, including the grandfather of Barnes’ wife, kidnapped Frank from the state prison in Milledgeville and drove him to the woods near Frey’s Gin Road in Marietta, where he was hung from a tree in the pre-dawn of Aug. 17.

The Georgia State Board of Pardons and Paroles posthumously pardoned Frank in 1986 but did not exonerate him. A monument to Frank, funded by Jerry Klinger, president of the Jewish American Society for Historic Preservation, now sits on Roswell Road near Interstate 75, the woods having been cleared and built on many years ago.

“There is no doubt in my mind, and we’ll prove it at the appropriate time, that Leo Frank was not guilty,” Barnes said. “We can’t right all wrongs. However, I think it’s a bad thing if we can never admit we’re wrong. This gives us a good view of history to make sure we’ve got it right.”

There is no timetable for the CIU’s re-examination of the Frank case, in large measure because a director for the unit has not yet been hired and funding from the county must be arranged.

Nonetheless, as he left the courthouse after the press conference, Lebow found reason for optimism.

“This is the most confident anybody could be in the last 100 years that the Frank case will be treated fairly. Justice delayed is justice denied and it’s been delayed for over 100 years for this guy,” Lebow said. “If you want to make the future good, you have to make the past right, and this is an opportunity to make the past right and to heal a bad part of Georgia’s history.”

* * *

Source: National Vanguard correspondents, Atlanta Jewish Times

Introduction
By Alan M. Dershowitz

The trial, conviction, death sentence and its commutation and eventual lynching of Leo Frank during the second decade of the twentieth century, constitute a major episode not only in American legal history, but also in the development of American political institutions. The Knights of Mary Phagan, formed to avenge the murder of the young factory worker for which Frank was convicted, became an important component of the twentieth century resurrection of the Ku Klux Klan. The Anti-Defamation League of B’nai Brith was founded in reaction to the anti-Semitism generated – or at least disclosed – by the Frank case.

Sometimes characterized as the American “Dreyfus” case (a reference to the frame-up of a French Jew which fanned the flames of nineteenth century European anti-Semitism), the trial of Leo Frank in Atlanta, Georgia was conducted in a carnival atmosphere. Crowds outside the courthouse sang “The Ballad of Mary Phagan,” which included the following lyrics:

Little Mary Phagan
She left her home one day;
She went to the pencil-factory
To see the big parade.

She left her home at eleven,
She kissed her mother good-by;
Not one time did the poor child think
That she was a-going to die.

Leo Frank he met her
With a brutish heart, we know;
He smiled, and said, “Little Mary,
You won’t go home no more.”

Sneaked along behind her
Till she reached the metal-room;
He laughed, and said, “Little Mary,
You have met your fatal doom.”

Down upon her knees
To Leo Frank she plead;
He taken a stick from the trash-pile
And struck her across the head.

Crowds inside the courtroom shouted anti-Jewish epithets, and demanded Frank’s death. The smell of the lynch mob was in the air.

The State’s star witness was a black maintenance worker at the factory which Frank managed and at which Mary Phagan worked. He testified that Frank killed the young girl and ordered him to dispose of the body. When the jury convicted Frank, it was the first time in memory that a white man had been convicted of murder on the basis of uncorroborated testimony of a black witness. This apparent advance in racial justice was explained away by a local observer who said: “That wasn’t a white man convicted by that N…’s testimony. It was a Jew.”

Predictably, Frank was convicted, sentenced to death and denied relief on appeal, despite some critical dissenting words from Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. Unpredictably, the Governor of Georgia decided to commute Frank’s death sentence and leave him to serve out a term of life imprisonment. That appeared to be a great victory for Frank and his many supporters around the country, since the evidentiary foundation underlying Frank’s conviction was beginning to crumble as a result of the discovery of new evidence strongly suggesting that it was the government’s star witness – and not Frank – who had killed the victim. It seemed only a matter of time before Frank would be freed from his imprisonment.

In order to prevent Frank’s freedom, several of the “best” citizens of Georgia – including a minister, two former Supreme Court Justices, and an ex-sheriff – decided to take the law into their own hands. They constituted themselves as a vigilante committee and let it be known that they intended to kidnap Frank from prison and lynch him. Despite some perfunctory efforts by prison authorities to protect Frank, the lynch mob had little difficulty breaking into the prison and kidnapping Frank. It was obvious that at least some of the prison authorities were in on the plan. Frank was taken to Marietta, where he was lynched. Everyone knew exactly who was involved in the lynching – indeed some members of the lynch mob boasted about their participation and gave interviews to the press. Photographs of the lynching and souvenir pieces of the rope were sold throughout Georgia. Nonetheless, the coroner’s jury investigating the murder of Leo Frank concluded that it was unable to identify any of the perpetrators. This was typical of lynchings in the South during that era. The only difference is that this victim was not black.

There is a fascinating and largely unknown ethical story behind the public legal story of the Frank case. I use it as a teaching vehicle in my course on legal ethics. It turns out that while Leo Frank was on death row, one of Atlanta’s most prominent lawyers learned that Frank was innocent and that another man – presumably the government’s star witness – was the killer. We do not know for certain whether the real killer confessed directly to the lawyer, or to another lawyer who then sought ethical advice from the pillar of the bar. This is the way the eminent lawyer described it in his own writings:

I am one of the few people who know that Leo Frank was innocent of the crime for which he was convicted and lynched. Subsequent to the trial, and after his conviction had been affirmed by the Supreme Court, I learned who killed Mary Phagan, but the information came to me in such a way that, though I wish I could do so, I can never reveal it so long as certain persons are alive. We lawyers, when we are admitted to the bar, take an oath never to reveal the communications made to us by our clients; and this includes facts revealed in an attempt to employ the though he refuses the employment….The Law on this subject may or may not be a wise law – there are some who think that it is not – but naturally since it is the law, we lawyers and the judges cannot honorably disobey it.

The eminent lawyer (and any other lawyer who may have received the real killer’s confession in confidence) was forced into the most excruciating legal, ethical and moral dilemma a professional can possibly confront. The ethical rules of the profession are fairly clear. There is no available exception to the rule mandating confidentiality of privileged communications about past crimes. It is not a future crime for a guilty client to remain silent while an innocent man goes to his death for the murder committed by a silent, guilty client. The issue is a bit more complicated if the confessing client was, in fact, the witness who testified against Frank, for the client would then be confessing to perjury. Some courts and commentators have suggested that allowing perjured testimony to remain unrecanted, while the victim of the perjury remains under a death or prison sentence, may constitute a continuing fraud on the court, and thus an exception to the lawyer-client privilege. But that line of authority is hazy at best, and the eminent lawyer did not apparently consider it. He saw the legal and professional ethics issue as simple and straightforward. That still left the moral and personal issue of whether any human being – regardless of his or her profession – can and should allow a preventable miscarriage of justice to be carried out, especially in a capital case. My students in legal ethics generally split down the middle over whether they would violate the rules of the profession – engage in an act of civil disobedience against their own client – in order to save an innocent non-client.

In a typically lawyer-like way, the eminent lawyer in the real case apparently saw to it that the governor learned the information known to him, but without his own “fingerprints” being on the communication. This is how he put it: “Without ever having discussed with Governor Slaton the facts which were revealed to me, I have reason to believe, from a thing contained in the statement he made in connection with the grant of the commutation, that, in some way, these facts came to him and influenced his action.” But the eminent lawyer’s compromise did not work. Although the governor did commute Leo Frank’s sentence, he was not able to persuade a vengeful public of Frank’s innocence. I doubt that Frank would have been lynched had the eminent lawyer come forward and disclosed his information. Instead, his client would almost certainly have been lynched. The complexity of ethical and moral issues in the law can rarely be resolved by simple compromise solutions of the kind attempted by the lawyer in the Frank case. Indeed some such issues have no entirely satisfactory solutions.

Nearly seventy years after Leo Frank’s murder, new evidence of his innocence emerged. An eighty-two-year old man, who have been a youthful eyewitness to events surrounding the killing of Mary Phagan, finally came forward and told what he had seen back in 1913. His evidence contradicted the State’s star witness and strongly suggested that the murder was committed by that same witness, the black maintenance man. The murderer threatened the young witness with death if he ever mentioned what he had observed, and he did not come forward for all those years. Now, he has told his story and it seems to have persuaded most objective people that Leo Frank was lynched for a crime committed by someone else.

Finally, in 1986 Frank was posthumously pardoned with following official apology: “The lynching aborted the legal process, thus foreclosing further effort to prove Frank’s innocence. It resulted from the State of Georgia’s failure to protect Frank. Compounding the injustice, the State then failed to prosecute any of the lynchers.” Remarkably, some Georgians continued to resist the pardon.

Alan Dershowitz

Cambridge, Massachusetts
January 11, 1991

Source: Dinnerstein, Leonard. The Leo Frank Case. Notable Trials Library edition, 1991.

Leonard Dinnerstein

by Reed Miller

RETIRED ARIZONA Professor Emeritus of Judaic Studies, Leonard Dinnerstein, I am sorry to say, has joined the eternally dark pantheon of history-falsifiers. Dinnerstein is best known for being a scholar of the Leo Frank case. He doesn’t deserve to be so known.

Dinnerstein’s book The Leo Frank Case is shameless falsification of history. It is an embarrassment to American scholarship. Dinnerstein verifiably omitted some 99% of the facts contained in the 1,800 page official Leo M. Frank Georgia Legal Record that encompasses the 1913 murder trial of Frank and his State Supreme Court Appeals from 1913 through 1914. These legal records fortunately survived in their entirety into the 21st century — and they show us clearly how Dinnerstein cherry-picked his sources to give a bizarrely skewed view of the case.

Despite its essential worthlessness, Dinnerstein’s book has gone through edition after edition…

Dinnerstein has, to speak frankly (no pun intended), a racist agenda. He seems to want to perpetuate Jewish-gentile conflict by imputing anti-Semitism to 1913 Atlantans, when nothing could be further from the truth. And, just like the Frank legal team a century ago, he tries to lay the blame for Mary Phagan’s murder on an innocent Black man. Students of law and history should study the primary sources of the Leo Frank case — and then cross-reference them with any and every edition (from 1968 to today, there are many) of Dinnerstein’s book. They’ll soon see the real Leonard Dinnerstein at work. It’s not a pretty sight. Doubtless the great Professor Emeritus didn’t anticipate the easy availability of these primary source documents since the rise of the Internet, or he would have been more careful.

The main purpose of The Leo Frank Case is to smear the people of the South as violent Jew-haters (actually, the South was the most solidly pro-Jewish section of the United States then, and is now); defame one of the greatest statesmen of the Southern progressive era, Hugh Dorsey, as an unscrupulous political climber; perpetuate unfounded racist allegations against African-Americans; and shamelessly rehabilitate the image of Atlanta’s B’nai B’rith President, Leo M. Frank — the serial rapist-pedophile (see: GA Supreme Court Records, 1913, 1914), strangler, and convicted child killer. Quite an ambitious combination that might well daunt any author — I have to grant Professor D. a six-pointed gold star for audacious chutzpah. Frank was convicted in 1913 for bludgeoning, raping, garroting, and ordering the necro-mutilation of 13-year-old Mary Anne Phagan who worked in the sweatshop he operated in Atlanta, the National Pencil Company.

…after edition…

Essentially Dinnerstein’s life’s work has been promoting the thesis that the white Southerners of 1913 were so filled with anti-Jewish animus that they knowingly and willingly set free a guilty African-American man who had pounded his fists into the face of a little 13-year-old white girl, just before raping, strangling, and mutilating her — just so they could execute an innocent Jew. The thesis is preposterous and indefensible, yet Dinnerstein has single-mindedly stuck to it, in direct conflict with mountains of evidence, for over 50 years.

He suggests the reason Southern whites knowingly let the guilty black rapist and strangler go free was so they could instead indiscriminately, but intentionally, frame an innocent Jewish man for the crime — for no other reason than that he was Jewish. And wait, there’s more — topping it all off, Dinnerstein expects us to believe that the “unscrupulous” Solicitor General Hugh Dorsey and the Atlanta police and detectives, all worked together coaching James “Jim” Conley until he was as perfect as a trained parrot to trick the trial jury and unjustly convict Leo Frank.

…after edition…

Dinnerstein’s 200-plus-page opus reveals his obsession with purported anti-Jewish intrigues and plots in the Old South, most of which can be found nowhere else in the historical or any other literature. Search for them as you will, but the references nearly all lead back to Dinnerstein and then can be traced no further. For page after page he renders wrongful indictments against the people of Georgia, the South, and every Southerner — even though the consensus amongst historians and scholars of all ethnic backgrounds is that anti-Semitism was virtually non-existent in the South and especially so during the progressive era. Jews prospered there mightily.

There is certainly plenty of racism, bigotry, prejudice, and injustice to be found in our multicultural world, but there is really nothing more spineless and cowardly than to fabricate evidence of it and then falsely accuse someone, as the exalted Professor Emeritus has done.

The organized Jewish community regularly gave kudos and accolades to Dinnerstein for each of the numerous nearly-identical editions of his book, and his largely repetitive related volumes. They described Dinnerstein as the “definitive author” on the Leo Frank case (though in the last decade, the more circumspect but still propagandistic Steve Oney seems to have usurped that title).

…after edition, with no end in sight.

One thing Leonard Dinnerstein doesn’t tell the reader about the Frank-Phagan case is Frank’s astonishing admission, made on August 18, 1913, during his unsworn trial statement to the judge and jury, that he had walked directly to the exact spot, literally within inches, where Mary Phagan was killed — and at the exact time when she was murdered. That revelation was so incriminating that it amounted almost to a murder confession, and yet Dinnerstein conveniently leaves this stupefying incident completely out of his account of the case.

Dinnerstein also presents the hoax — repeated hundreds of times now by Abraham Foxman of the ADL and by dozens of media and academic hacks — that mobs of angry people were screaming “racist anti-Semitic death threats” at the jury through the courtroom windows during Leo Frank’s trial. These alleged mobs were claimed to have screamed at the jurors “Hang the Jew or we’ll hang you!” and other threats. (See his “Leo Frank and the American Jewish Community” in the American Jewish Archive Journal, 1968, volume 20, number 2.)

More claims about the Frank case, echoing the Dinnerstein fabrications, from the ADL Web site.

But a diligent search will show you — absolutely — that none of the local Atlanta newspapers, some of whom took a pro-Frank stance — and who had teams of reporters inside and outside the courtroom — ever mention any such incident, which surely would have been instant grounds for a mistrial. It was also never mentioned during the trial by Frank’s own high-powered and expensive legal team, who surely would have jumped at the chance to gain a new trial in a new venue for their well-connected client.

The Jewish Anti-Defamation League (ADL) still uses Dinnerstein’s “hang the Jew” hoax as a major part of its outreach on the Leo Frank case.

Let me back up for a few moments and give new readers the basic facts of the case — one of the most important and fascinating criminal cases of the last century.

Mary Phagan

Just minutes past noon on Confederate Memorial Day, Saturday, April 26, 1913, Mary Phagan entered the National Pencil Company building to collect her pay envelope containg just $1.20.

(She normally earned $4.05 a week, but her pay was significantly reduced that week because of a shortage of materials, causing her to be temporarily laid off for a few days. Not many rights for workers in those days! There was a shortage of the brass sheet metal used to make tubular eraser holders attached at the ends of the pencils. Mary Phagan worked at the rear of the second floor in what was called the “metal room.” Her work station was next to the bathroom entryway there. Mary was a “tipper,” meaning that her job was inserting rubber erasers into the brass tubes at the ends of the pencils. She worked and sweated there for a little over seven cents an hour during each typical 55-hour, six-day work week. She started working there in the spring of 1912, when she was only 12 years old.)

After picking up her pay on that fateful day from Leo Frank in his office at the other end of the second floor from her work station, she was never seen alive again.

Fast forward fifteen hours. It is long after midnight, and the only person in the pencil factory is the night watchman, a middle-aged black man named Newt Lee. Only moments after using the racially segregated “negro toilet” in the basement, Lee spotted the dead body of Mary Phagan not far off, near the furnace. It was 3:15 am, Sunday, April 27, 1913. Newt quickly went up to Leo Frank’s second floor office, where the only working phone in the building was located. Lee reported the incident to Sergeant W.F. Anderson, night shift call officer for the Atlanta police. Lee also made repeated attempts — for eight minutes — to contact Leo Frank by phone, but no one answered at the Selig residence, where Frank lived with his wife and in-laws. The police arrived at the National Pencil Company factory 15 minutes later.

Leo Frank

With Newt Lee leading the way, together they descended into the basement and then walked more than 100 feet to where Mary lay. She was in a filthy state, lying on her side, her face encrusted with dirt. Her girlish body gave the appearance of having been dragged. Seeing Mary Phagan’s apparently reverently crossed arms after she had suffered such an obviously violent death was a weirdly out-of-place sight those men would be unlikely to forget for the rest of their lives. A piece of ripped lace around her neck was not enough to stop the officers from noticing that directly underneath it was an eighth-inch cord made into a makeshift noose. The cord was taut around her neck, sunk deep into her flesh. Mary’s dress was ripped from hem to crotch, and her bloodied underwear were still attached to her body, torn open across the crotch up to the right seam. Nearby, two peculiar handwritten notes were discovered on the floor. They bore an obviously contrived message.

Newt Lee, right, in custody

The notes, later dubbed the death notes or murder notes, described in Southern black dialect (even though they purported to be written by Mary herself)) a “negro” killer — the tall, dark, and slim “night witch,” (evidently meaning “night watch”), a close description of Newt Lee, who was the tall, slim, and dark-complected nightwatchman who found Mary’s body. Lee had worked for the National Pencil Company for only three weeks. The death notes essentially accused him of raping Mary Phagan.

Lee was an aging, nearly bald, and married African-American security guard, with years of graveyard shift work experience. He had long been trusted to be alone, on the job at night, guarding valuable property. He had no criminal record. But if the incriminating notes stood up before a jury, Newt Lee would certainly hang by the neck until dead, as prescribed by law — and doubtlessly that was exactly what the note’s author intended.

These notes were very strange — constructed as if they were written by little Mary herself, and addressed to her mother Francis, they claimed to have been written while Mary was in the midst of being sexually molested by Newt Lee. In the Old South, black men who even whistled at or “wild talked” to — or even jostled — White women, stood a very dangerous risk of bodily harm, if not death by lynching. Out of nearly 3,500 lynchings in American history, the vast majority of victims were black men. (By the way, a few years later, it was Hugh Dorsey, the man who prosecuted Frank and was vilified by Dinnerstein, who used his political influence and clout to fight the barbaric practice of lynching, even when it was politically unpopular to do so. Dorsey’s efforts helped to put an end to lynching in America.)

In 1913, Leo Frank was no ambitious upstart. He was an established and prominent leader of Atlanta’s Jewish community. He was superintendent and part-owner of the pencil company, a position he had held for five years. And he was the president of the Atlanta B’nai B’rith.

After trying all night long, the police finally got Leo Frank on the telephone at dawn and informed him briefly that they needed to speak with him face to face.

On Sunday morning, Leo Frank was escorted by police to P.J. Bloomfield’s mortuary to identify the victim. Frank claimed he wasn’t sure. He said he would have to check his accounting and payroll ledgers to verify that this had been the girl he’d paid at noon the day before. The officers drove Leo Frank to the factory and together they all went up to his second floor window-front office. He reviewed his accounting books. The police specifically wanted Leo Frank to try to pinpoint at what time Mary Phagan appeared in his office to collect her pay. After reviewing his payroll logbook, Leo Frank told the police Mary Phagan had arrived in his office on Saturday, April 26, 1913, at sometime near 12:03 pm.

Leo Frank then took out Newt Lee’s time card from the clock and examined it, telling the police it was punched perfectly every half hour between 6:00 pm on April 26, 1913, to 3:00 am on April 27, 1913. The information showed that Newt Lee had performed in accordance with what was expected of him during his security shift and would not have had time to leave nor to clean himself up after any bloody confrontation. Leo Frank was not under suspicion at the time and was allowed to go home.

The next day, Monday, Leo Frank was called down to the police station where he made a deposition. Though he wasn’t under any suspicion at the time, Leo Frank nevertheless had two of Georgia’s most powerful lawyers representing him there: Herbert Haas and Luther Z. Rosser.

Leo Frank then said that Mary Phagan had come into his second floor office on April 26, 1913, between “12:05 pm and 12:10 pm, maybe 12:07 pm.” Frank put the time as 12:07 pm — when the day before he had said 12:03. He would go on to change Mary’s arrival time on at least three separate occasions, which raised more than a few eyebrows. (He also made the eyebrow-raising claim that he didn’t know Mary by name, though he had paid her wages every week, and walked by her work station many times every day, for an entire year.)

On Monday, Frank also changed another important part of his story: Now he told the police that he had “made a mistake” concerning Newt Lee’s time card. In contradiction to his statement the day before, when he had reported in front of the officers that Lee’s time card was punched perfectly every half hour, he now said that after closer inspection of the card, he had discovered that the nightwatchman had actually missed four of his half-hour punches, leaving open four hours of unaccounted-for time.  (The police had made a serious error in leaving the card in Frank’s possession overnight instead of impounding it as evidence.) This “new information,” which was believed by some investigators at the time, caused even greater suspicion to be directed at Lee, who was at the time already the prime suspect. If circumstances had been just slightly different, this might have ended up being the coup de grace — the death blow — for Newt Lee. Instead, it turned out — the very next day — to be a blunder that forever turned the tide against Frank.

While he was being interrogated, Frank had a flash of brilliance. He stood up and volunteered — demanded, actually — that he disrobe for the police. They inspected his body, and clothes, and saw no signs of blood, as Frank knew they wouldn’t — and it was then a certainty, as Frank also knew, that they would then be impelled to visit his home for the purpose of inspecting his laundry. And, as he doubtlessly also reasoned, they would then feel obligated to do the same at Newt Lee’s residence. Leo Frank had adroitly plucked himself out of the spider’s web, and got the spiders to take him home where they inspected his hamper and found nothing amiss.

Ah, that most delicate feint and subtle engram of a hint — for the police to check the hamper at the nightwatchman’s shack at 68 Henderson Street. And on Tuesday morning, April 29, 1913, at 9:00 am sharp, armed with a skeleton key, they did exactly that. And what do you know — there they found a shirt, apparently Newt Lee’s shirt — spattered, covered, soaked in blood!

It would have worked, too, had the police been just a little less skeptical and careful. An innocent man would have been executed from a crime with which he had nothing to do. But skeptical and careful they were, and it was shown that the shirt had not been spattered by blood in any conflict, but had been purposely immersed in blood. The “bloody shirt” was a fake — and it would not be the last piece of planted fake evidence in this case. It has occurred to you, I’m sure — just as it did to the Atlanta police — that only a guilty man would plan and hire out such fakery, and there was only one man in Atlanta with a motive to do that.

Newspaper account of the discovery by R.P. Barrett

Meanwhile, more and more real evidence was piling up. On Monday morning, April 28, pencil factory employee Robert Paul Barrett found bloody hair tangled around the iron handle of his bench lathe (see the Coroner’s Inquest, May, 1913), which was located against the south wall of the metal room. Moments later, one of the child laborers there, Magnolia Kennedy, discovered a five-inch-wide fan-shaped blood spatter on the floor near the metal room bathroom door. She immediately told Barrett. Someone had smeared Haskoline, a white powder lubricant, over the stain, but it was imperfectly concealed.

These metal room forensic discoveries were critical. They strongly suggested that Mary Phagan had not been killed in the basement where she was dumped, but instead in the metal room. The metal room was on the second floor, the same floor where she worked, where her metal supplies would have been, and where everyone acknowledged she had met Frank to get her pay just a short time before her death. Another fact supporting this conclusion was that the drag marks on Mary’s face showed no signs of bleeding or healing despite the fact that she had obviously been bodily dragged, and drag marks were found in the basement leading from the elevator shaft to where she was found. Therefore she was already dead when she was dragged across the basement floor. The police measured 140 feet from the drag marks’ beginning at the basement’s elevator shaft to their end where she was found.

After Leo Frank was arrested on Tuesday, he swore to the police that he had never left his office on the day of the murder from noon to 12:45 pm, the crucial time in which it was ultimately determined that Mary Phagan lost her life. He said the same thing at the Coroner’s Inquest. He continued to say the same thing — that he’d never left his office during that time — for three and a half months.

Monteen Stover

A breakthrough in the Mary Phagan murder investigation occurred on May 3, 1913: Atlanta police accidentally bumped into 14-year-old Monteen Stover at the National Pencil Company factory. Stover was a former employee of the pencil company. She was present with her stepmother, who was terrified and livid because of some very interesting circumstances that had occurred exactly one week earlier. Monteen had failed to retrieve her pay envelope when she arrived to pick it up from Leo Frank the week before, on April 26, 1913 — the day of the murder. When the police asked Stover what time she came to the factory, she said she arrived in Frank’s office at 12:05 pm and found his office empty, so she waited for five minutes and finally gave up and left at 12:10 pm, because she thought no one was there. When asked how she knew what time it was, Stover reminded the police about the prominent wall clock in Leo Frank’s office.

On Sunday, May 4, 1913, armed with this new information from Monteen Stover, police detective John Black and Pinkerton detective Harry Scott approached Leo Frank in his jail cell to test his murder alibi. They asked him if he had been in his office every minute from noon to 12:45 pm on April 26. Leo Frank responded affirmatively, saying “yes.” The question was restated — “Were you in your office every minute between twelve noon and 12:45 pm on April 26, 1913?” Leo Frank again said “yes.”

Detective Harry Scott

Here was a significant contradiction. Someone was not telling the truth. Someone was lying about Frank’s whereabouts at the very time that Mary Phagan was being raped and killed. And it certainly seemed unlikely that Monteen Stover was the one who was lying, or could have any conceivable motive to lie.

This new information suggested that Leo Frank might have gone with Mary Phagan back to the metal room before 12:05 pm. The mystery was narrowing. But then Leo Frank tried to widen it again the next day by changing his account of the time of Mary Phagan’s arrival for the third time.

On Monday, May 5, 1913, Leo Frank told the Coroner and his six-man jury that Mary Phagan had come to his office between 12:10 pm and 12:15 pm on the murder day. This contradicted his deposition to police on Monday, April 28, 1913, when he had stated that Mary came into his office between 12:05 pm and 12:10 pm, “maybe 12:07 pm” — and even further contradicting his Sunday, April 27, 1913, statement that Mary Phagan entered his office at 12:03 pm.

The Coroner and his jury unanimously voted to bind Leo Frank over for the murder of Mary Phagan and to put the case into the hands of the grand jury.

After a two-week investigation into the Phagan murder, Leo Frank was unanimously indicted by 21 grand jurymen — who included in their number several Jewish members, putting into serious doubt Dinnerstein’s claim that Leo Frank was indicted and convicted because of anti-Semitism. For insight into what was stated at the Leo Frank grand jury hearings, the accounts in the three major competing Atlanta newspapers at the time, which are being transcribed and published at the Leo Frank Case Research Library.

Leo Frank’s 29-day trial began on July 28, 1913 and ended on August 25, 1913.

While on the stand at his trial, Leo Frank changed his story again. On August 18, 1913, at 2:46 pm, he attempted to explain why Monteen Stover had found his office empty on the murder day between 12:05 pm and 12:10 pm. Frank told the judge and jury that the reason Monteen had found his office empty, and why he had denied he’d ever left it, was because he might have “unconsciously” gone to the bathroom in the metal room toilet during the period when Monteen Stover was looking for him. The metal room bathroom was also — and this is what makes his revelation so startling — within inches of where Mary Phagan was killed and this putative bathroom visit also occurred at the very time that Mary was being sexually assaulted and murdered.

Here are Leo Frank’s exact words on the witness stand at his trial:

Now, gentlemen, to the best of my recollection from the time the whistle blew for twelve o’clock until after a quarter to one when I went up stairs and spoke to Arthur White and Harry Denham, to the best of my recollection, I did not stir out of my office; but it is possible that in order to answer a call of nature or to urinate I may have gone to the toilet. Those are things that a man does unconsciously and can not tell how many times nor when he does it (Leo Frank Trial Brief of Evidence, 1913, p. 186).

This astonishing admission was most significant, not only because the only set of bathrooms that existed on the second floor were located in the metal room (Defendant’s Exhibit 61, State’s Exhibit A), but also because the area next to the toilet in the metal room was the place where Jim Conley testified he had found Mary Phagan dead after Leo Frank had privately confessed to Conley that he had committed a violent assault on her because she had refused to have sex with him.

There was no bathroom on the first floor, and none of the management or white employees would likely have gone all the way down into the dark, gloomy basement and walked all the way to the rear in the pitch-black darkness for the purpose of illicitly using the racially segregated “negro toilet” there. No, if Leo Frank made an unconscious trip to answer a “call of nature,” the metal room bathroom, the one he always used, would have been his only possible destination.

Leo Frank would sustain this dumbfounding admission on March 9, 1914, in an authorized jailhouse interview published in the Atlanta Constitution.

Leonard Dinnerstein completely ignores this astounding piece of evidence from the mouth of Leo Frank himself.

Minola McKnight

Another thing Professor Emeritus Dinnerstein does not provide you with is the whole story of what the cook in the Frank-Selig household, Minola McKnight, and her husband Albert, revealed to the police on June 3, 1913. It amounted to yet another confession by Leo Frank.

The facts attested to are these: At 10:30 pm on the day of the murder, the drunk Leo Frank confessed to his wife, Lucille S. Frank, what he had done at the factory that afternoon (Leo Frank Trial Brief of Evidence, State’s Exhibit J, June 3, 1913). Frank told his wife he “didn’t know why” he “would murder” — and then asked for his pistol to shoot himself. Frank also made his wife Lucille sleep on the floor.

This likely explains why Lucille did not visit Leo Frank in jail for two weeks after his arrest on Tuesday, April 29, 1913, which became quite a scandal at the time. It also explains why grave site number one, reserved for Lucille S. Frank (location ID: 1-E-41-1035-01) and located to the immediate left of Leo Frank’s grave at Brooklyn’s Mount Carmel Cemetery, is still empty. Lucille Frank died in 1957 and chose not to be buried there. She requested cremation in her magistrate-notarized 1954 will. According to Lucille’s grandnephew, she asked that her ashes be spread in an Atlanta park, but a local ordinance prevented it, so she was instead buried in an unmarked grave between the tombstones of her beloved parents in Atlanta’s Oakland Cemetery — hundreds of miles away from Leo Frank’s grave (Oney, 2003, 2004).

Lucille Frank

Leonard Dinnerstein also perpetuates sensationalistic hack writer and self-promoter Pierre van Paassen’s ridiculous 1964 ( ! ) “bite mark” hoax. Van Paassen, whose writing included such gems as claiming to have seen supernatural “ghost dogs,” is advanced as having important “revelations” about the case — by the same Dinnerstein who totally ignores vital trial testimony.

Van Paassen wrote:

The Jewish community of Atlanta at that time seemed to live under a cloud. Several years previously one of its members, Leo Frank, had been lynched as he was being transferred from the Fulton Tower Prison in Atlanta to Milledgeville for trial on a charge of having raped and murdered a little girl in his warehouse which stood right opposite the Constitution building. Many Jewish citizens who recalled the lynching were unanimous in assuring me that Frank was innocent of the crime.

I took to reading all the evidence pro and con in the record department at the courthouse. Before long I came upon an envelope containing a sheaf of papers and a number of X-ray photographs showing teeth indentures. The murdered girl had been bitten on the left shoulder and neck before being strangled. But the X-ray photos of the teeth marks on her body did not correspond with Leo Frank’s set of teeth of which several photos were included. If those photos had been published at the time of the murder, as they should have been, the lynching would probably not have taken place.

Though, as I said, the man died several years before, it was not too late, I thought, to rehabilitate his memory and perhaps restore the good name of his family. I showed Clark Howell the evidence establishing Frank’s innocence and asked permission to run a series of articles dealing with the case and especially with the evidence just uncovered. Mr. Howell immediately concurred, but the most prominent Jewish lawyer in the city, Mr. Harry Alexander, whom I consulted with a view to have him present the evidence to the grand jury, demurred. He said Frank had not even been tried. Hence no new trial could be requested. Moreover, the Jewish community in its entirety still felt nervous about the incident. If I wrote the articles old resentments might be stirred up and, who knows, some of the unknown lynchers might recognize themselves as participants in my description of the lynching. It was better, Mr. Alexander thought, to leave sleeping lions alone. Some local rabbis were drawn into the discussion and they actually pleaded with Clark Howell to stop me from reviving interest in the Frank case as this was bound to have evil repercussions on the Jewish community.

That someone had blabbed out of school became quite evident when I received a printed warning saying: “Lay off the Frank case if you want to keep healthy.” The unsigned warning was reinforced one night or, rather, early one morning when I was driving home. A large automobile drove up alongside of me and forced me into the track of a fast-moving streetcar coming from the opposite direction. My car was demolished, but I escaped without a scratch (Pierre van Paassen, To Number Our Days, 1964, p. 237-8).

Pierre van Paassen

Whew! “Great scholar” and “expert on the Frank case” Leonard Dinnerstein apparently forgot how to do basic fact checking when he endorsed that pile of dreck. And then he forgot again when he published his second edition. And his third, and his fourth. My, my, my — such a lot of forgetting!

In reality, x-ray technology was in its infancy in 1913, and it was not possible to x-ray bite marks on skin in 1913, nor would such a thing be necessary anyway — bite marks are on the surface! No contemporary newspaper reports or court papers or medical reports indicate that Mary Phagan was bitten at any time or by any one. It’s a complete fiction, never heard of until “ghost dog” Pierre made it up — and then Dinnerstein repeats it as if it were established fact.

Vehicles had virtually no safety features to speak of in 1922, when van Paassen claimed his car was run down and caused to crash into a streetcar, so the chances of someone walking away “without a scratch” from a such a head-on collision are very close to zero.

Leo Frank’s appeals attorney was not named “Harry Alexander” and Leo Frank was not lynched “on his way to his murder trial” in 1913. Nor did anyone this side of a madhouse ever claim that Leo Frank was not tried! Leo Frank had his trial, was found guilty, and was sentenced to death by Judge Leonard Strickland Roan on August 26, 1913. He was hanged nearly two years later on August 17, 1915. And Leo Frank went on trial in Atlanta — not 170 miles away in Milledgeville where the hoaxer suggests the trial was scheduled.

Dinnerstein also perpetuates another egregious and easily-disproved hoax: that, during Frank’s trial, mobs of angry people were screaming anti-Semitic slogans and directing death threats at the jury through the courtroom windows (see “Leo Frank and the American Jewish Community,” American Jewish Archive Journal 1968, vol. 20, no. 2). None of Leo Frank’s voluminous appeals to every possible court up to and including the US Supreme Court ever mention such an incident, nor do any of the local Atlanta newspapers — each of which had teams of sensation-hungry reporters inside and outside the courtroom every single day of the trial.

Jim Conley

In the television documentary The People v. Leo Frank (2009), Professor Dinnerstein hoaxed us again when he said that Leo Frank helped the police uncover the fact that pencil factory sweeper Jim Conley could write. Discovering that Conley could write was considered very important, since murder notes had been found next to Mary Phagan’s body. The facts, however, are radically different from Dinnerstein’s claims.

Approximately 22 minutes into the film, our Professor Emeritus makes authoritative-sounding comments on the interrogation of Jim Conley by the Atlanta Police Department. Dinnerstein states to Director Ben Loeterman:

They [the Atlanta Police] asked [Jim Conley] about the notes; he said, ‘I can’t read and write.’ That happened to come up in a conversation between the police and Frank, and Frank said, ‘of course he can write, I know he can write, he used to borrow money from me and sign promissory notes’ — so Conley had not been completely honest with the police.

Dinnerstein is implying that Leo Frank was the one who told police that Conley could write, thus putting a major break in the case right in the hands of the detectives. He makes the same claim in his book, though, strangely, the alleged quote from Leo Frank is entirely different this time, stating on page 22:

The authorities had not considered Conley a serious suspect until they discovered that he could write. The Negro sweeper had originally denied his ability to read and write, but the news that he could eventually reached Harry Scott of the Pinkertons because of a chance remark made in front of Leo Frank. “I know he can write,” Frank said, “I have received many notes from him asking me to loan him money.”

Britt Craig

The problem for Dinnerstein, now that people can read original, contemporary accounts of the case from people who were there, is that his made-up stories can easily be debunked. Here’s the real story of how detective Harry Scott found out that Jim Conley could write, as reported by journalist Britt Craig, who personally interviewed the people directly involved, for the Atlanta Constitution of July 13, 1913:

Conley had maintained that he was illiterate—couldn’t even write his name, and as this seemed the only vulnerable spot in his story, Scott told him he probably was a liar.

At least, it was the only thing about the negro that could plausibly be discredited. On the theory that every negro who owns a wife and home as Conley owned, possesses furniture bought on the installment plan, the two sleuths cast about for some contract to which the black man could possibly have attached his signature.

They visited third-rate furniture stores, business houses and jewelry shops. The search was fruitless. The signature of Conley was as missing as the secret of the sphinx. Scott was prepared to abandon his hunch on the doorsteps of failure, when Fate—not a thirst—took them to the vicinity of a saloon near Five Points.

Providence—and not the bouncer—urged a gentleman in Panama and white shoes, and with the oily air of a collector, gently through the doorway. He stepped to the sidewalk and recognized Black. He greeted and shook a disconsolate hand.

“You’ve got a nigger down at police station I’d certainly like to see,” he announced.

“What nigger?” said Black, promoting conversation.

“That Conley nigger?”

Something bright and dazzling flashed through Scott’s hunch-ridden brain as he noticed the batch of bills carefully folded in the person’s coat pocket.

The hunch told him to collar the oily individual and search his batch of bills. He did, at the oily one’s consent. A single glance revealed a contract issued to Jim Conley. A second glance revealed the negro’s name, scrawled in a characteristic hand all over the signee’s line.

Scott’s hunch had been fulfilled. It had guided him to a specimen of the black sweeper’s handwriting—two words in barely legible script that proved the negro a liar three ways from breakfast. It has since proved the means of lifting the Phagan secret from the mire of mystery.

The contract was signed by Conley more than twelve months ago for a watch he had bought from a jewelry firm. It is now in possession of the solicitor general, and likely will be produced as evidence in the coming trial of Leo Frank.

What followed its discovery was the most successful third degree ever operated at police headquarters. Scott and Black showed the signature to the solicitor general, detective chief and Chief Beavers.

Then, they showed it to Conley.

It was on a Sunday afternoon. Police station was dull and drowsy and a sleepy atmosphere pervaded the building. Even the inevitable newspaper reporter was absent. Scott and Black took the prisoner into the little 6×8 “sweat box” and sat him where the light could play full on his face.

Scott locked the door and threw the key over the transom. Black pulled off his coat, let down his suspenders and put cigarettes conveniently near. Conley blinked at the light and wondered what was coming off.

Scott pulled a mysterious something from his pocket and laid it on the table. It was a folded bit of paper, and he smiled significantly as it left his hand. Conley grimaced and shifted a leg.

“Well, Jim, we’ve got the deadwood on you. Better cough up and tell us something.”

“Honest, white folks, I swear ’fore God and High heaven I don’t know a thing.” His plea was pathetic in its apparent sincerity.

“But we know better. The quicker you tell, the better off you’ll be. Kick in, Jim—kick in. It’s the best for you.”

“I can’t kick,” protested the negro. “I ain’t got nothin’ to kick for.”

Scott stepped to the table and pointed at the folded slip.

“You see that! It’s enough to hang you. You don’t know what it is, and you couldn’t guess in a year. It’s dead-wood, nigger. It’s dead-wood. You’d better kick through or we’ll pull it on you.”

The negro studied the slip intently. He was sorely puzzled. Great drops of sweat rolled down his face and his fingers twitched nervously. His very air betrayed guilt.

“Listen,” said Scott. “Can you write?”

“Naw, sir, I can’t. I never could.”

“Will you swear it?”

“I shore will.”

“Do you know the penalty for perjury?”

“Naw, sir—what is it?”

“Twenty years in the gang—maybe more.”

“What’s perjury?”

“Swearing a lie.”

“But I ain’t goin’ to swear no lie.”

“You will if you swear you can’t write. Here! Look at this.”

The Pinkerton man unfolded the mysterious slip. It was the contract. The negro noted the signature with a betraying flash of recognition.

“How could you sign this if you couldn’t write?”

Conley was wordless for minutes. He stared dumbly out the window and twisted his fingers. Suddenly, he exclaimed:

“White folks, I’m a liar!”

Besides the bill collector, another person who told the police that Jim Conley could write — long before Leo Frank mentioned it — was E.F. Holloway, the day watchman at Frank’s pencil factory.

You will note that there is nothing whatever in this contemporary account above about Leo Frank being the “great hero” and letting the police know that Conley could write. It was only later that Frank admitted that Conley could write: Leo Frank and his allies had initially been trying to frame Newt Lee and had been very, very silent about Jim Conley, since they knew Conley was an accessory in the case and could hurt Frank. Frank kept Conley’s literacy a guarded secret until Harry Scott found out about it. When the Frank forces failed to frame Lee and began to frame Conley, however, there was no longer anything to be gained by silence. Reading Leonard Dinnerstein’s supposedly exhaustive and authoritative works, you would learn nothing of this.

Dinnerstein also tells another whopper at about the 52-minute mark in the People v. Leo Frank documentary:

No one in the Jewish community in Atlanta publicly commented about Frank’s innocence or guilt, or about the nature of the trial, even though the Jewish community was incensed.

Rabbi David Marx

That’s yet another easily-disproved hoax from Dinnerstein. Anyone who has read the coverage in the Atlanta daily newspapers, before and during and after the trial of Leo Frank for the murder of Mary Phagan, knows that there are innumerable cases of Jews stating publicly that that Frank was innocent and “couldn’t be guilty,” including some statements made in court, and including the public statements of Atlanta’s Rabbi David Marx who was quoted in the documentary just seconds after Dinnerstein’s whopper — and in fact, in one case Rhea Frank, Leo Frank’s mother, called prosecutor Hugh Dorsey a “Gentile dog” in open court because she objected to a line of questioning that suggested that Leo Frank might have made inappropriate sexual advances on the young girls in his employ. This episode was widely reported and certainly Leonard Dinnerstein knows about it (and all the others).

My mother taught me, and I still believe, that I should always try to see the good in everything. So, despite the fact that Professor Dinnerstein’s book is filled from beginning to end with easily disproven falsehoods and obfuscations, I must admit that the gold leaf sprayed on the edges of each page is rather nice. And another good thing to come from all this is my new acquaintance with all the fine writers and researchers at The American Mercury and other excellent publications, who have freely allowed me to quote and paraphrase their ideas and discoveries here.

I encourage everyone to buy — no, forget that — to borrow a copy of Leonard Dinnerstein’s book and compare it with the official legal files, records, and documents of the Leo Frank case. You will then understand in depth why Dinnerstein’s book is sham scholarship, a fraud motivated by a bizarre, twisted, racist agenda.

And once you have understood that, then ask yourself why the pillars of academe, the mass media, and the censor-happy potentates at Google and the other Internet giants, still promote Leonard Dinnerstein as an authority and a scholar. If enough people do that, and come to understand Dinnerstein and the culture of deception he represents, then there really will be something beyond mere good — there will be something great that will come from the evil this man has done.