Dear PBS Board of Directors:

Paula Kerger, President

Chair Catherine Robb,

Co-Chair Geoff Sands and Jayme Swain

Members: Delores Fernandez Alonso, Mark G. Contreras, Bob Culkeen, Mildred Garcia, Anne Gates, Susan Goldberg, Chuck Hagel, Shae Hopkins, Marvin Irby, Larry Irving, Michael Isip, Gunjan Kedia, Becky Magura, Carla McCage, Sandra Cordova Micek, Luis Patino, Greg Petrowich, Vivian Riefberg, Tina Sharkey, Amy Shaw, Holden Thorp, and Ed Ulman

My name is Mary Phagan-Kean (@PhaganKean). I am the great-niece and namesake of little Mary Phagan (1899 – 1913), the thirteen-year-old girl murdered at the National Pencil Company in Atlanta on April 26, 1913. [1]

I am writing to express serious concern about Episode One of Black and Jewish America: An Interwoven History, specifically the segment from approximately 39:36 to 46:00. [2] The program presents a highly inflammatory and contested interpretation of the Leo Frank case in a way that gives viewers the impression that key factual disputes have long been settled, when in fact some of the most important claims in that segment remain deeply disputed or are presented without necessary context. [3]

One of my chief concerns is the repetition of the famous claim that crowds outside the courthouse shouted, “Hang the Jew or we’ll hang you,” at the jury. Steve Oney, whose 2003 book has often been treated as a major modern account of the case, later said plainly that this story “didn’t happen” and that it was a later embellishment that became embedded in subsequent retellings. [4] At the same time, accuracy requires another clarification as well. Frank’s lawyers did later during appeals allege hostile public sentiment and mob domination in court, but the United States Supreme Court summarized the state courts’ position as being that those allegations had been “not sustained.” [5] A documentary shown on public television should make that distinction clearly. It should not blur the line between a later allegation, a later legend, and a fact established by the official record. The Georgia Supreme Court affirmed the sufficiency of the evidence at Leo Frank’s trial to convict him.

The program also frames the undercurrent of Frank’s prosecution chiefly through antisemitism, but Frank’s own recorded statements complicate that picture and should not be omitted. In his 1914 interview with Abraham Cahan (founder of the Jewish Daily Forward), Frank said, “Anti-Semitism is absolutely not the reason for this libel that has been framed against me.” [6] That full statement matters. A fair documentary should not quote selectively in either direction, it should strive to be objective rather than an advocacy piece. It should let viewers see the complexity of the defendant’s own words rather than forcing the record into a simpler ideological paradigm.

In contemporaneous reporting as well, Frank publicly blamed a Black man for the crime. [7] Leo Frank also altered Newt Lee’s time card, erasing 4 timestamps to incriminate him for the Mary Phagan murder. The death notes found next to the victim, Mary Phagan, described Newt Lee physically, including a misspelled version of his job title.

The legal record also deserves greater precision than the program gives it. Frank’s conviction was not left to a single unreviewed jury verdict. More than a dozen appeals and related petitions were pursued by his defense team and all failed. [8] The U.S. Supreme Court rejected his federal due process claim in Frank v. Mangum. [5] None of that, by itself, settles the historical debate for all time. But it does mean that a documentary owes viewers a careful distinction between later interpretations of the case and what the courts actually held at the time.

The pardon history is also frequently misstated and should have been handled more carefully. In 1983, the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles declined to grant Frank a [full] pardon [of exoneration] because it said it was impossible to decide conclusively his guilt or innocence. [9] In 1986, the board did grant a half-pardon, but it did so “without attempting to address the question of guilt or innocence.” [10] That was not a legal exoneration. [10] Any documentary that leaves viewers with the impression that innocence was officially established by the state is telling them something the pardon itself did not say. In 1995, Rabbi Steven Lebow, Philip Goldstein and others had the historical marker removed at the Phagan family grave plot because they were unhappy that the sign made clarified that Leo Frank had not been vindicated.

In part 4 beginning at 20:25 of this PBS series, Mr. Gates misinformed the public about the Nation of Islam’s book series: The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews.  The Phagan family has recognized their superior scholarship with respect to the Leo Frank Case (Vol. 3) and we would challenge Mr. Gates and the producers of the PBS series to examine their 536-page work.  No other study of the case has been as comprehensive and analytical and all serious scholars of the case have acknowledged the Nation of Islam’s contribution including Dr. Jeffrey Melnick.

Current efforts to revisit the case only make accuracy more important. In April 2025, a spokesperson for the Fulton County District Attorney’s Office said that the Conviction Integrity Unit had the Leo Frank case file under review and that a decision would be announced when the review was complete. If public institutions are going to revisit a 1913 conviction in 2026, then the public deserves full transparency about what new, verifiable evidence is said to justify that review. [11] My concern is not simply that your documentary took a side. My concern is that it presented a highly contested side as though it were settled history and omitted major pieces of evidence and procedure that would have helped viewers judge the matter for themselves.

A PBS documentary presumably carries a high-level of public trust. That trust is weakened when a program promotes partisan advocacy and repeats disputed claims without telling viewers that even widely cited modern accounts reject some of them. When a documentary blurs the difference between allegation and proof, and when it leaves out evidence that complicates its thesis in only one favorable direction, that’s propaganda, not truth seeking, that’s “agitprop,” not objectivity. The Leo Frank case is controversial enough without additional partisan smoothing, over simplification, or selective presentation. A public audience deserves better than a one-sided retelling dressed up as settled history.

I respectfully ask that PBS and the producers correct or clarify this segment, or at minimum make room for the omitted documentary record, including the defendant’s own words, the procedural history of the appeals, and the exact language of the 1983 and 1986 pardon decisions.

Thank you for your time and attention.

Respectfully,

Mary Phagan-Kean | Posted on X, April 26, 2026

Great-niece and namesake of Mary Phagan

www.LittleMaryPhagan.com

cc:  Mr. Henry Louis Gates Jr (@HenryLouisGate2 on X),

@pbsteachers @realDonaldTrump @PressSecDOW @KingsleyCortes

#LeoFrank #MaryPhagan #PBS #Atlanta #Georgia

Enclosed a 1913 photo of Mary Phagan colorized with AI on April 26, 2026

References

1. HISTORY.com Editors. (2025, May 27). Murder in Atlanta pencil factory leads to lynching of Leo Frank. HISTORY.

2. Public Broadcasting Service. (2026, February 3). Let My People Go. In Black and Jewish America: An Interwoven History. PBS.

3. Melnick, J. P. (2000). Black-Jewish relations on trial: Leo Frank and Jim Conley in the New South. University Press of Mississippi. @melnickjeffrey1

4. Finnigan, D. (2004, February 5). Q & A with Steve Oney. Jewish Journal. Also see Oney, S. (2013, September 24). The People v. Leo Frank. Atlanta Magazine. @steveoneywriter

5. Frank v. Mangum, 237 U.S. 309 (1915). Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center.

6. Berger, P. (2013, August 30). Leo Frank case stirs debate 100 years after Jewish lynch victim’s conviction. The Forward. Also see Telling Story of Leo Frank From His Jail Cell. The Forward.

7. Mary Phagan’s Murder Was Work of a Negro Declares Leo M. Frank. (1913, May 31). The Atlanta Constitution. ProQuest Historical Newspapers reproduction surfaced via library scan.

8. Anti-Defamation League. (2009). The People v. Leo Frank teacher’s guide. Also see National Archives. (2025, May 29). Progressive Era: Leo Frank Petition. @ADL

10. Jewish Telegraphic Agency. (1986, March 12). Leo Frank is posthumously pardoned by Georgia board. Also see Leo Frank pardon denied. (1983, December 23). The Washington Post.

11. Dinnerstein, L. (2020, August 11). Leo Frank case. New Georgia Encyclopedia.

12. Quinn, P. (2025, April 3). With Broadway’s “Parade” in Atlanta, Fulton County DA says Leo Frank case is “under review”. Atlanta News First.

William J. Burns and the Great Leo Frank Case Carnival

Introduction

IN 1914, six days short of the first anniversary of the strangulation-murder of 13-year-old Mary Phagan by Jewish businessman and B’nai B’rith official Leo M. Frank on Confederate Memorial Day, 1913, the Frank case entered its most frenetic public phase. A major legal decision was slated to be dropped in a few days. By then, Frank had already been convicted of the gruesome murder of Mary. But Frank’s defense team, flush with money from a national publicity campaign, was furiously working to get witnesses to reverse their testimony, and get Frank a new trial or exonerated one way or another — an exoneration effort that still continues today, led by Jewish groups including the ADL (Anti-Defamation League).

Famed — some would say notorious — private detective William J. Burns (hired months earlier by the Frank defense and paid out of a nationally-raised fund organized by wealthy Jewish businessmen Albert Lasker of Chicago and Adolph Ochs and Louis Marshall of New York) returned to Atlanta, where Mary’s murder had taken place, by train from a secretive trip to the “Big Apple” and announced he was ready at last to deliver his long-promised report on the case, a document he had been teasing in the national press since early April.

Across town at Atlanta Police Headquarters, State’s witness Albert McKnight sat in a self-requested jail cell, having walked in on April 15, 1914 and asked Chief of Police James L. Beavers for protection after un-repudiating his original affidavit in the case. He had repudiated it in a second affidavit he had given to Frank’s defense operative Captain C.W. Burke, an affidavit Burke had paid for, McKnight now admitted, with the promise of a $100-a-month Pullman job.

Solicitor General Hugh M. Dorsey spent the day assembling counter-affidavits from witnesses.

Frank’s high-priced attorneys, Luther Z. Rosser and Reuben R. Arnold, whose extraordinary motion for a new trial had been filed four days earlier on April 16 and had already won Frank a stay of his April 17 execution, worked on adding late-arriving affidavits as amendments to the motion and roughed out their oral argument.

Tye, Peeples, and Jordan (also working for Frank and doubtlessly paid out of the massive war chest from the national publicity campaign), whose parallel constitutional motion had been filed the same day arguing the verdict should be set aside because Frank had not been in the courtroom when the jury rendered it, assembled their supporting affidavits on the absence issue.

The clock was running on Judge Benjamin H. Hill, who would convene the hearing on both motions two days later, on Wednesday, April 22, 1914 — and would deny them both.

* * * * *

“THE TRUTH IS ON THE MARCH”
William J. Burns and the Great Leo Frank Case Carnival

by Carl Carnie

ADVERTISING MAGNATE Albert Lasker, who led a cynical personal crusade on behalf of Leo Frank in coordination with Jewish elites from New York and Chicago, did not coin the once-famous phrase he used. Émile Zola wrote, “La vérité est en marche, et rien ne l’arrêtera” (“The truth is on the march, and nothing will stop it”), in the closing paragraph of J’Accuse…! on January 13, 1898, sixteen years before the Jewish-American ad man appropriated it. What Lasker did was pinch the well-known line Zola originated during the Dreyfus Affair, polish it, and weld it to the Leo Frank defense campaign as a branded American slogan.

That act of importation made ‘The Truth Is on the March’ a thing of strange, exotic, and dangerous beauty in the United States. The mobilizing tagline was drawn from a highly disputed French military treason scandal that had afterward been politically engineered and media-manufactured into a “miscarriage of justice” in the minds of the public during the late nineteenth century. Lasker then freshly rebadged it for use in the Frank case. He pressed it into service on behalf of a convicted sex killer with zero connection to the Dreyfus case — except for the fact that both of the accused were Jews. More than a century later, some of Leo Frank’s posthumous advocates still insist on calling the Mary Phagan case “the American Dreyfus Affair,” which is exactly the misreading that Lasker’s motto was designed to produce.

“The Truth Is on the March.” Six plain words repurposed by an advertising executive who helped sell cigarettes, Palmolive soap, and Sunkist oranges for a living, applying the same art of persuasion he had perfected at the Lord and Thomas agency while helping addict a nation to nicotine and laying the commercial groundwork for a cancer epidemic. Lasker turned the catchphrase into one of the most effective pieces of ad copy ever written. It had everything a catchphrase needs: gravity, momentum, moral certainty, and the implied drumbeat of Union soldiers trampling south to right a wrong. It would do enormous work for the Frank campaign, raising millions of dollars and changing the minds of millions who knew the case only through the lens of Lasker and his confederates in the press. The effects lasted more than a lifetime. They still reverberate today.

But in April 1914 what was actually marching into Atlanta was not Truth, but a cadre of clowns.

The William J. Burns Detective agency made a show of their arrival, press agents in tow. It was like a circus caravan in slow motion, a snake of painted wagons rolling up Peachtree Street with a brass band in the lead and a line of carnies trudging behind, all gilt and bunting and fresh shellac.

Then the ringmaster stepped off a creaky train in Atlanta’s Terminal Station, with nothing in his hands but smoke. Then the showman barked, “Step right up, goys and goyls! Have I got a story for you!”

What the Lasker operation needed, and what Lasker bought when he brought in the high-priced self-promoting Burns, was a carnival barker. Not necessarily a detective. A showman. A mountebank. A man who could stand in front of the lofty tent with his thumbs hooked in a red vest and bellow, “Roll up, roll up, see the great vindication of Leo Max Frank, the innocent man framed by an ignorant mob of Southern Jew-haters, the truth revealed for the first time here in this tent, just one thin dime.”

William J. Burns played that role with real skill. He was an infamous egotist that would put Donald Trump to shame. He had the nickname the press had given him — “America’s Sherlock Holmes” — stitched into the lining of his elegant and expensive coats. He had a national reputation he could sell to deep pockets.

What he did not have was evidence.

Investigative journalist Tom Watson saw him for exactly what he was and pinned the label down in January 1915, calling Burns “that calliope detective” and “the fussy charlatan who hunts for evidence with a brass band and a searchlight.”

The vaporware at the center of the big tent

Burns did not bring evidence to Atlanta. He brought ballyhoo. By the time he arrived on the morning of April 20, 1914, his unseen “report” on the Frank case had been floating through the American press for roughly three months, morphing from whisper to tease to forthcoming-any-day-now to nearly-ready to almost-here, never once solidifying into something a judge could read, a prosecutor could cross-examine, or a clerk could file. It was the phantom deliverable. The card dealer’s sleight-of-hand. The rabbit that stayed stubbornly in the hat no matter how many times the ringmaster reached in with a flourish.

Watch the timeline, because it was genuinely a dark comedy, one that played hideous games with the feelings of Mary Phagan’s kinfolk and with the blue-collar Georgians who, like little Mary, were struggling to make ends meet during fifty-five-hour workweeks running from Saturday to Saturday. The multimillionaire Burns and the multimillionaire Lasker were from another world entirely.

On April 6, 1914, the New York Times ran an article entitled “Burns Completes His Frank Report.”

On April 20, 1914, the Atlanta Journal announced Burns had returned from his mysterious rail junket and was “ready to make his report whenever the attorneys for the defense want it.”

On April 22, Judge Ben Hill denied Frank’s “extraordinary motion” anyway.

On April 24, two days after Hill’s ruling, the same New York Times that had declared the report “complete” three weeks earlier ran the piece “Hold Back Report of Burns on Frank.”

Completed on the sixth. Ready on the twentieth. Held back on the twenty-fourth. The report did everything a real document does — except appear in a courtroom, except get tested by cross-examination, except appear at all.

It was Schrodinger’s evidence: alive in the headlines, dead on delivery, and the box never got opened.

Burns was running vaporware a century before Silicon Valley. What he was selling wasn’t a detective’s conclusion. No. He was selling the perpetual anticipation of a detective’s conclusion. Every week of “almost ready” was a week the donor checks kept clearing. The actual product — the signed, evidence-annexed, witness-listed document that could be placed in a judge’s hands and defended under oath — would have been a disaster for the Burns Agency, because once delivered, it could be examined. Once examined, it would stop selling tickets and running up bar tabs. So the strategy was simple. Never finish it. Never even start it. Announce it forever. Hold it back. Promise it tomorrow. Issue fragments. Leak “conclusions.” Tease the reveal. Let the caravan roll on. And get the hell out of town before the bullets start.

The clown car was carrying Chicago money

The men writing the checks were not fools, but either they were being played by Burns — or Burns was giving them exactly what they wanted, an impression of Leo Frank’s innocence. Possibly it was a bit of both. Lasker was in Chicago running Lord and Thomas. Marshall was in New York running the American Jewish Committee. Schiff was on Wall Street. Ochs was at the New York Times. None of them was going to show up at the Fulton County courthouse and ask Burns for a page count. They were going to read the New York papers at breakfast, see the Burns byline, and feel reassured that their money was producing results. And that was the whole point. The circus was not pitched at Georgia. The circus was pitched at a half-dozen breakfast nooks on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan and the Chicago Gold Coast. It was also aimed at people too busy making a living to investigate for themselves, just as the preposterous ADL version of this case is today.

The Chicago money and the New York money kept flowing like a river of gold because Burns kept the smoke machine running, and as long as the smoke kept rolling out under the tent flaps, the customers outside believed there had to be elephants and magicians inside.

The January 30, 1915, Atlanta Constitution eventually put numbers on the flow: “Large Sums Paid to Burns Agency, Haas Tells Court.” The receipts came out only after the circus had left town.

“The Truth Is on the March.” he said. Stirring words. Napoleonic verbs. What was really coming to town was a clown car.

The three-ring racket

Watch the choreography from the grandstand. The headlines are in the papers week after week: Burns is in Europe. Burns cables back. Burns dispatches an operative. The operative arrives. Burns leaves. Burns is returning. Burns has returned. Burns is in conference with the solicitor. Burns is not in conference. Burns goes to New York. Burns sends word from Newark. Burns is back from Nashville. Burns is in Atlanta. Burns is in Marietta. Burns is being chased out of Marietta by a mob. Burns has been rescued. Burns has lost his Atlanta license. Burns has left town. Every one of those movements generated a news cycle. Every news cycle was a fresh poster tacked to a fresh lamppost. Every news cycle was a sensation of gossip and rumor.

Tom Watson’s Jeffersonian covered the tour with the acid pen Watson had been sharpening his whole life. Watson wrote 30,000 pages during his lifetime that survived to the 21st century. Pencil in hand, he called his writing “sawing wood.” Historians describe his writing as having its own life force of venom, wit, and electricity.

His headline-writing skills impress too:

April 23, 1914: “How Much Longer Will the People of Atlanta Endure the Lawless Doings of William J. Burns? What Right Has This Sham Detective to Tamper With the Witnesses That Told the Truth?”

April 30, 1914: “The Frank Case; the Great Detective; and the Frantic Efforts of Big Money to Protect Crime.”

May 7, 1914: “William Jackass Burns, at Another Angle: Some Tarnished Lawyers; Some Bought Newspapers; and the Murder of a Little Georgia Girl.”

Watson was not subtle, but on the Burns question specifically he was not wrong either. He saw a paid performer mistaking himself for a fortune-teller, and he named him for it, week after week.

The rage that cut both ways

The carnival did not just infuriate Frank’s detractors — though it certainly did that, all the way to a Marietta sidewalk in May 1914 where a mob had Burns by the collar before Dan Lehon could drag him out of town.

Even Frank’s own supporters on the ground in Atlanta began to get impatient with Burns. Every leaked teaser that failed to produce anything substantial was a withdrawal from Frank’s shrinking reserves of public benefit-of-the-doubt. Every day Burns spent working a press gag in New York, Chicago, or Atlanta was a day the clock ran down on Frank’s stay of execution.

The men writing the checks in Chicago and New York could afford an infinite theater run. Frank could not. He was in a cell in The Tower watching a calendar with a deadline on it, listening to a ringmaster in a distant city promise a cavalry that never came.

The poisoned booth

Now came the reward. Burns offered a thousand dollars — and the journalist and Frank sycophant Connolly in 1915 would claim the figure eventually climbed to five thousand — for any person anywhere in the country who could produce evidence of a single immoral act across the entirety of Leo Frank’s thirty years of life. On its face, it looks like a challenge thrown to the prosecution. Look closer and it is something much more clever than that.

Any witness who walks up to the booth, raises a hand, and offers real information damaging to Frank’s character is now, by definition, a bounty-chaser. The second they claim the money, defense counsel stands up at the next hearing and says, with total accuracy, “Your Honor, this witness has a direct financial interest in the testimony he is about to give. He is a paid claimant. His credibility should be weighed accordingly.”

The reward stamps every witness it attracts with a mark in ink that reads “impeachable” the moment he opens his mouth, anywhere. And the more astute kind of witness would see that, and therefore never come forward.

So you can see how the reward does “reverse work” too — and this is where the con really shines. The longer no claimant comes forward, the louder Burns can proclaim that no compromising material on Frank’s character exists anywhere on Earth. Look at the silence, he says. I offered a thousand dollars and nobody took it.

The silence is not exculpatory. Silence in the face of a tainted bounty proves only that nobody wanted to climb into the poison ivy.

It may mean no relevant evidence exists. It may equally mean that anyone with relevant evidence saw the bear trap and stayed out of it. It may mean that the witnesses with the most relevant material — the young women who had already testified in 1913 about Frank’s conduct around teenage girls at the National Pencil Company — had already paid the reputational price of testifying once, under oath, and were not about to volunteer to be called Burns’ bounty-chasers on top of it.

The informational content of the silence is zero. The rhetorical content, however, is enormous.

Meanwhile, Burns’ show rolls on. The “full truth” is always in the future, tomorrow, next week, next month, next never.

That is the deepest trick the Burns operation taught the Frank campaign, and it is the trick that is still being run today, more than a century later. The Truth is always marching. The Truth is never arriving. The Leo Frank vindication is always around the next bend. The exoneration is forthcoming. The absolution is coming. The exculpation is near. The new evidence will be revealed next year, next decade, next generation, in a book not yet written, in a documentary not yet funded, in a pardon petition not yet filed.

In 1914 the deliverable was Burns’s “report.” In 1986 it was a “humanitarian” pardon that explicitly declined to address guilt or innocence, and left the conviction intact. In every intervening year some new Frank partisan has stood in front of a microphone and told the county, the state, the country, and the whole world, with all the credibility of a man who has never read the Brief of Evidence, that Leo Frank “deserves to be exonerated.”

Not a single one of them has ever produced court-admissible evidence that would survive cross-examination by Hugh Dorsey, or Hugh Dorsey’s dog for that matter.

That is the inheritance Burns bequeathed. A memorable slogan lifted from someone else’s work. A “report” that wasn’t even a report, just an unclaimed reward and some offhand opinions. A “report” that is never cited by Frank partisans because it wasn’t even a report at all.

The Chicago money paid the freight. The New York money paid the lighting. The Georgia public paid the cover charge in social trauma, lynching, and endless denigration in the alien-owned “national press.” And when the tent came down and the caravan moved on, what remained in the middle of the empty lot was exactly what had been at the center of it from the start. Nothing. A handbill on the ground reading “The Truth Is on the March,” and under those words, very small, the words “Admission $1,000 and your soul.”

_____________

Citations

Wikipedia contributors. (2026). “Albert Lasker”; Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved April 20, 2026, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Lasker

Leo Frank Case Research Library. (2024). New York Times chronology of Frank-case coverage, February through May 1914. https://leofrank.info/newspapers/new-york-times

Wikipedia. (2026). “Leo Frank”; retrieved April 20, 2026, from
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leo_Frank

Wikipedia. (2026). “Louis Marshall”; retrieved April 20, 2026, from
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Marshall

Wikipedia. (2026). “William John Burns”; retrieved April 20, 2026, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_John_Burns

Watson, T. E. (1915, January). “The official record in the Leo Frank case.” Watson’s Magazine, calling Burns “that calliope detective” and “the fussy charlatan who hunts for evidence with a brass band and a searchlight.”

Atlanta Journal. (1914, April 20). “Burns now ready to present Frank evidence.” Page 16, column 5. Reproduced at
http://MaryPhagan.com

Atlanta Constitution. (1915, January 30). “Large sums paid to Burns agency, Haas tells court.” Reproduced at Leo Frank Case Archive. https://leofrank.org/newspapers/atlanta-constitution

Atlanta Constitution. (1914, May 2). “William J. Burns driven out of Marietta.” Reproduced at Leo Frank Case Archive.
https://leofrank.org/newspapers/atlanta-constitution

Atlanta Constitution. (1914, June 20). “Burns is dropped by police chiefs.” Reproduced at Leo Frank Case Archive.
https://leofrank.org/newspapers/atlanta-constitution

Watson, T. E. (1914, April 23). “How much longer will the people of Atlanta endure the lawless doings of William J. Burns?” The Jeffersonian, Vol. 11, Issue 16. Reproduced at Leo Frank Case Research Library. https://leofrank.info/enright/the-jeffersonian.html

Watson, T. E. (1914, April 30). “The Frank case; the great detective; and the frantic efforts of big money to protect crime.” The Jeffersonian. Reproduced at Leo Frank Case Archive.
https://leofrank.org/newspapers/jeffersonian-weekly

Watson, T. E. (1914, May 7). “William Jackass Burns, at another angle: Some tarnished lawyers; some bought newspapers; and the murder of a little Georgia girl.” The Jeffersonian. Reproduced at Leo Frank Case Archive. https://leofrank.org/newspapers/jeffersonian-weekly

Connolly, C. P. (1915). The Truth About the Leo Frank Case. Vail-Ballou Company. Reproduced at Leo Frank Case Archive.
https://leofrank.org/reactions/the-truth-about-the-leo-frank-case

_____________

Source: Author

by Alexander Sullivan

In a rare and deeply personal interview, Mary Phagan-Kean, the grand-niece and namesake of Mary Phagan, shared her family’s perspective, her personal journey, and why she remains firmly convinced of Leo Frank’s guilt.

Mary Phagan’s murder at the National Pencil Company in Atlanta set off a chain of events that would culminate in Leo Frank’s conviction, a contentious commutation of his sentence, and ultimately, a lynching by a group of vigilantes. Over a century later, her descendant Mary Phagan-Kean is determined to make sure her family’s voice is heard in a narrative that she says has been distorted by powerful forces.

A Silence Broken at Thirteen

Mary Phagan-Kean first learned of her infamous namesake at the age of 13 in a Charleston, South Carolina classroom. When her science teacher asked whether she was related to the murdered girl from Atlanta, it was the first time she’d ever heard of the story. Traumatized and confused, she took the question home to her father, who turned pale with shock. The family had kept a vow of silence—so strict that even Mary’s mother, who had been married to her father for 14 years, was unaware of the case.

“He told me Leo Frank was a sexual pervert who murdered little Mary Phagan,” she recalled. “That’s all he told me at the time.”

It wasn’t until she moved back to Atlanta at 15 that the full weight of her legacy hit her. On the first day of school at Shamrock High in DeKalb County, every single one of her teachers asked if she was related to Mary Phagan. “It was shocking. I thought I’d never be asked that question again—but all my life, I’ve been asked that question.”

A Lifelong Investigation

Her father eventually encouraged her to investigate the case on her own terms. “He told me to go read everything, form my own opinion, and that the family would help me along the way.”

Thus began a decades-long journey of personal research and collecting. Mary dove into archives, books, court documents, and original newspaper reports. Over the years, she amassed a collection spanning 57 years, which she recently donated to the Georgia State Library. Her goal: to ensure that the “other side” of the story was not lost.

“I was stunned when I learned that a rabbi was donating a collection supporting Leo Frank’s innocence,” she said. “I knew then that I needed to make sure our side was preserved too. There are always two sides to a story.”

Questioning the Narrative

Phagan-Kean expressed concern about how the Leo Frank case has been portrayed over the years, particularly by powerful institutions such as the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). “They rewrote history,” she asserted. “They turned Leo Frank into a victim and ignored what happened to my family.”

She referred to her careful reading of period sources, including trial summaries, newspaper articles that included question and answers from the trial and the “brief of evidence” that survives in place of a now-missing transcript. She emphasized that the early books on the case presented both sides fairly, particularly citing Guilty or Not Guilty by Francis X. Busch. In contrast, she found later works such as A Little Girl is Dead and A Night Fell on Georgia to be misleading and agenda driven.

When Alonzo Mann, a former office boy, came forward in 1982 with claims that he had seen janitor Jim Conley moving Mary’s body—claims used by some to suggest Frank’s innocence—Phagan-Kean was skeptical. She argued that this “new evidence” was not convincing and had too many discrepancies when weighed against the detailed court reports and media coverage of the time.

Family Opposition to the Pardon

Mary Phagan-Kean took an active stance in opposing efforts to posthumously pardon Leo Frank. She reached out to the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles when she learned that a group, including members of the ADL, was applying for the pardon without the family’s knowledge. One board member, Michael Wing, was unaware that close relatives of Mary Phagan were still living.

Eventually, in 1983, the Board denied the pardon, stating they could not determine guilt or innocence. However, in 1986, a surprise announcement was made: Frank was granted a posthumous pardon—without addressing his guilt or innocence.

Phagan-Kean viewed this as a betrayal. “It was all done in secret. We were kept in the dark again,” she said. “It was all orchestrated by backroom deals, including by people like Governor Roy Barnes and Rabbi Lebow. I’m calling them out in my new book.”

Continuing the Fight for the Truth

Despite the passage of time and repeated portrayals of Frank as a victim of antisemitism, Phagan-Kean remains resolute. She acknowledged that antisemitism is a serious issue but rejects the idea that it was the motive behind Frank’s conviction.

“To me, the racism in this case was more directed at Jim Conley, an African-American man who was treated horrifically by both sides. But the real issue is that Leo Frank had a fair trial, and there was strong evidence against him.”

Her upcoming book, a revised edition with 16 new chapters, is set to address what she calls “hoaxes and misinformation,” including media portrayals such as the NBC miniseries that aired in 1987. She claimed the dramatization was riddled with falsehoods, including fabricated scenes that never occurred.

The Legacy of Mary Phagan

The Phagan family has remained protective of their ancestor’s legacy. When the city of Marietta, where Mary is buried, sought to mark her grave with signage for historical tourism, her father refused. “She already has a beautiful marble grave,” Phagan-Kean said. “We don’t need a marker. We don’t want this to be a sideshow.”

Now, at 70 years old, Phagan-Kean says she speaks out only when asked and doesn’t lead with her connection. “You have to ask me about it. I don’t go around introducing myself as the grand-niece of Mary Phagan.”

Yet, when asked, she speaks with a clarity forged over decades of painful discovery, independent research, and unwavering commitment to what she sees as the truth.

“My only goal is for the truth to win again,” she said. “This isn’t about hate. It’s about facts. And those facts have been buried long enough.”

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 Ron Unz

About a week ago both the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal devoted considerable space to the coverage of “Parade,” the revival of a 1998 Broadway musical on the 1915 killing of Leo Frank, a Jewish factory manager in Atlanta, Georgia, arguably the most famous lynching in American history.

Frank had been convicted and sentenced to death for the rape and murder of a young girl in his employ and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) was founded in an effort to save his life. After numerous legal appeals failed, the state’s governor eventually commuted Frank’s sentence and a group of outraged citizens responded by hanging Frank. The incident was portrayed in both the musical and the associated media coverage as a particularly horrifying example of American anti-Semitism.

However, the actual facts of that case were quite different than that and in 2018 I’d discussed them at considerable length as part of a longer article. Given the recently renewed spotlight on the issue and the fascinating implications of the true story, I’ve decided to extract and republish my analysis in hopes of bringing it to wider current attention.

Although I had long recognized the power and influence of the ADL, a leading Jewish-activist organization whose officials were so regularly quoted in my newspapers, until rather recently I had only the vaguest notions of its origins. I’m sure I’d heard the story mentioned at some point, but the account had never stuck in my mind.

Then perhaps a year or two ago, I happened to come across some discussion of the ADL’s 2013 centenary celebration, in which the leadership reaffirmed the principles of its 1913 founding. The initial impetus had been the vain national effort to save the life of Leo Frank, a young Southern Jew unjustly accused of murder and eventually lynched. In the past, Frank’s name and story would have been equally vague in my mind, only half-remembered from my introductory history textbooks as one of the most notable early KKK victims in the fiercely anti-Semitic Deep South of the early twentieth century. However, not long before seeing that piece on the ADL I’d read Albert Lindemann’s highly-regarded study The Jew Accused, and his short chapter on the notorious Frank case had completely exploded all my preconceptions.

Anonymous works published by heavily-demonized religious-political movements naturally engender considerable caution, but once I began reading the 500 pages of The Leo Frank Case: The Lynching of a Guilty Man I was tremendously impressed by the quality of the historical analysis. I think I have only very rarely encountered a research monograph on a controversial historical event that provided such an enormous wealth of carefully-argued analysis backed by such copious evidence. The authors seemed to display complete mastery of the major secondary literature of the last one hundred years while drawing very heavily upon the various primary sources, including court records, personal correspondence, and contemporaneous publications, with the overwhelming majority of the 1200 footnotes referencing newspaper and magazine articles of that era. The case they made for Frank’s guilt seemed absolutely overwhelming.

The basic outline of events is not disputed. In 1913 Georgia, a 13-year-old pencil company worker named Mary Phagan was last seen alive visiting the office of factory manager Leo Frank on a Saturday morning to collect her weekly paycheck, while her raped and murdered body was found in the basement early the next morning and Frank eventually arrested for the crime. As the wealthy young president of the Atlanta chapter of B’nai B’rith, Frank ranked as one of the most prominent Jewish men in the South, and great resources were deployed in his legal defense, but after the longest and most expensive trial in state history, he was quickly convicted and sentenced to death.

The facts of the case against Frank eventually became a remarkable tangle of complex and often conflicting evidence and eyewitness testimony, with sworn statements regularly being retracted and then counter-retracted. But the crucial point that the NOI authors emphasize for properly deciphering this confusing situation is the enormous scale of the financial resources that were deployed on Frank’s behalf, both prior to the trial and afterward, with virtually all of the funds coming from Jewish sources. Currency conversions are hardly precise, but relative to the American family incomes of the time, the total expenditures by Frank supporters may have been as high as $25 million in present-day dollars, quite possibly more than any other homicide defense in American history before or after, and an almost unimaginable sum for the impoverished Deep South of that period. Years later, a leading donor privately admitted that much of this money was spent on perjury and similar falsifications, something which is very readily apparent to anyone who closely studies the case. When we consider this vast ocean of pro-Frank funding and the sordid means for which it was often deployed, the details of the case become far less mysterious. There exists a mountain of demonstrably fabricated evidence and false testimony in favor of Frank, and no sign of anything similar on the other side.

The police initially suspected the black night watchman who found the girl’s body, and he was quickly arrested and harshly interrogated. Soon afterward, a bloody shirt was found at his home, and Frank made several statements that seemed to implicate his employee in the crime. At one point, this black suspect may have come close to being summarily lynched by a mob, which would have closed the case. But he stuck to his story of innocence with remarkable composure, in sharp contrast to Frank’s extremely nervous and suspicious behavior, and the police soon shifted their scrutiny toward the latter, culminating in his arrest. All researchers now recognize that the night watchman was entirely innocent, and the evidence against him planted.

The case against Frank steadily mounted. He was the last man known to have seen the young victim and he repeatedly changed important aspects of his story. Numerous former female employees reported his long history of sexually aggressive behavior toward them, especially directed towards the murdered girl herself. At the time of the murder, Frank claimed to have been working alone in his office, but a witness who went there reported he had been nowhere to be found. A vast amount of circumstantial evidence implicated Frank.

A black Frank family servant soon came forward with sworn testimony that Frank had confessed the murder to his wife on the morning after the killing, and this claim seemed supported by the latter’s strange refusal to visit her husband in jail for the first two weeks after the day of his arrest.

Two separate firms of experienced private detectives were hired by Frank’s lavishly-funded partisans, and the agents of both eventually came to the reluctant conclusion that Frank was guilty as charged.

As the investigation moved forward, a major break occurred as a certain Jim Conley, Frank’s black janitor, came forward and confessed to having been Frank’s accomplice in concealing the crime. At the trial he testified that Frank had regularly enlisted him as a lookout during his numerous sexual liaisons with his female employees, and after murdering Phagan, Frank had then offered him a huge sum of money to help remove and hide the body in the basement so that the crime could be pinned upon someone else. But with the legal noose tightening around Frank, Conley had begun to fear that he might be made the new scapegoat, and went to the authorities in order to save his own neck. Despite Conley’s damning accusations, Frank repeatedly refused to confront him in the presence of the police, which was widely seen as further proof of Frank’s guilt.

By the time of the trial itself, all sides were agreed that the murderer was either Frank, the wealthy Jewish businessman, or Conley, the semi-literate black janitor with a first-grade education and a long history of public drunkenness and petty crime. Frank’s lawyers exploited this comparison to the fullest, emphasizing Frank’s Jewish background as evidence for his innocence and indulging in the crudest sort of racial invective against his black accuser, whom they claimed was obviously the true rapist and murderer due to his bestial nature.

Those attorneys were the best that money could buy and the lead counsel was known as the one of the most skilled courtroom interrogators in the South. But although he subjected Conley to a grueling sixteen hours of intense cross-examination over three days, the latter never wavered in the major details of his extremely vivid story, which deeply impressed the local media and the jury. Meanwhile, Frank refused to take the stand at his own trial, thereby avoiding any public cross-examination of his often changing account.

Two notes written in crude black English had been discovered alongside Phagan’s body, and everyone soon agreed that these were written by the murderer in hopes of misdirecting suspicion. So they were either written by a semi-literate black such as Conley or by an educated white attempting to imitate that style, and to my mind, the spelling and choice of words strongly suggests the latter, thereby implicating Frank.

Taking a broader overview, the theory advanced by Frank’s legion of posthumous advocates seems to defy rationality. These journalists and scholars uniformly argue that Conley, a semi-literate black menial, had brutally raped and murdered a young white girl, and the legal authorities soon became aware of this fact, but conspired to set him free by supporting a complex and risky scheme to instead frame an innocent white businessman. Can we really believe that the police officials and prosecutors of a city in the Old South would have violated their oath of office in order to knowingly protect a black rapist and killer from legal punishment and thereby turn him loose upon their city streets, presumably to prey on future young white girls? This implausible reconstruction is particularly bizarre in that nearly all its advocates across the decades have been the staunchest of Jewish liberals, who have endlessly condemned the horrific racism of the Southern authorities of that era, but then unaccountably chose to make a special exception in this one particular case.

In many respects, the more important part of the Frank case began after his conviction and death sentence when many of America’s wealthiest and most influential Jewish leaders began mobilizing to save him from the hangman. They soon established the ADL as a new vehicle for that purpose and succeeded in making the Frank murder case one of the most famous in American history to that date.

Although his role was largely concealed at the time, the most important new backer whom Frank attracted was Albert Lasker of Chicago, the unchallenged monarch of American consumer advertising, which constituted the life’s blood of all of our mainstream newspapers and magazines. Not only did he ultimately provide the lion’s share of the funds for Frank’s defense, but he focused his energies upon shaping the media coverage surrounding the case. Given his dominant business influence in that sector, we should not be surprised that a huge wave of unremitting pro-Frank propaganda soon began appearing across the country in both local and national publications, extending to most of America’s most popular and highly-regarded media outlets, with scarcely a single word told on the other side of the story. This even included all of Atlanta’s own leading newspapers, which suddenly reversed their previous positions and became convinced of Frank’s innocence.

Lasker also enlisted other powerful Jewish figures in the Frank cause, including New York Times owner Adolph Ochs, American Jewish Committee president Louis Marshall, and leading Wall Street financier Jacob Schiff. The Times, in particular, began devoting enormous coverage to this previously-obscure Georgia murder case, and many of its articles were widely republished elsewhere. The NOI authors highlight this extraordinary national media attention: “The Black janitor whose testimony became central to Leo Frank’s conviction became the most quoted Black person in American history up to that time. More of his words appeared in print in the New York Times than those of W.E.B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, and Booker T. Washington—combined.”

Back a century ago just as today, our media creates our reality, and with Frank’s innocence being proclaimed nationwide in near-unanimous fashion, a long list of prominent public figures were soon persuaded to demand a new trial for the convicted murderer, including Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, and Jane Addams.

Ironically enough, Lasker himself plunged into this crusade despite apparently having very mixed personal feelings about the man whose cause he was championing. His later biography reveals that upon his first personal meeting with Frank, he perceived him as “a pervert” and a “disgusting” individual, so much so that he even hoped that after he managed to free Frank, the latter would quickly perish in some accident. Furthermore, in his private correspondence he freely admitted that a large fraction of the massive funding that he and numerous other wealthy Jews from across the country were providing had been spent on perjured testimony and there are also strong hints that he explored bribing various judges. Given these facts, Lasker and Frank’s other major backers were clearly guilty of serious felonies, and could have received lengthy prison terms for their illegal conduct.

With the New York Times and the rest of the liberal Northern media now providing such heavy coverage of the case, Frank’s defense team was forced to abandon the racially-inflammatory rhetoric aimed at his black accuser which had previously been the centerpiece of their trial strategy. Instead, they began concocting a tale of rampant local anti-Semitism, previously unnoticed by all observers, and adopted it as a major grounds for their appeal of the verdict.

The unprincipled legal methods pursued by Frank’s backers is illustrated by a single example. Georgia law normally required that a defendant be present in court to hear the reading of the verdict, but given the popular emotions in the case, the judge suggested that this provision be waived, and the prosecution assented only if the defense lawyers promised not to use this small irregularity as grounds for appeal. But after Frank was convicted, AJC President Marshall and his other backers orchestrated numerous unsuccessful state and federal appeals on exactly this minor technicality, merely hiring other lawyers to file the motions.

For almost two years, the nearly limitless funds deployed by Frank’s supporters covered the costs of thirteen separate appeals on the state and federal levels, including to the U.S. Supreme Court, while the national media was used to endlessly vilify Georgia’s system of justice in the harshest possible terms. Naturally, this soon generated a local reaction, and during this period outraged Georgians began denouncing the wealthy Jews who were spending such enormous sums to subvert the local criminal justice system.

One of the very few journalists willing to oppose Frank’s position was Georgia publisher Tom Watson, a populist firebrand, and in an editorial he reasonably declared “We cannot have…one law for the Jew, and another for the Gentile” while he also later lamented that “It is a bad state of affairs when the idea gets abroad that the law is too weak to punish a man who has plenty of money.” A former Georgia governor indignantly inquired “Are we to understand that anybody except a Jew can be punished for a crime.” The clear facts indicate that there was indeed a massive miscarriage of justice in Frank’s case, but virtually all of it occurred in Frank’s favor.

All appeals were ultimately rejected and Frank’s execution date for the rape and murder of the young girl finally drew near. But just days before he was scheduled to leave office, Georgia’s outgoing governor commuted Frank’s sentence, provoking an enormous storm of popular protest, especially since he was the business partner of Frank’s chief defense lawyer, an obvious conflict of interest. Given the enormous funds that Frank’s national supporters had been deploying on his behalf and the widespread past admissions of bribery in the case, there are obviously dark suspicions about what had prompted such a remarkably unpopular decision, which soon forced the former governor to exile himself from the state. A few weeks later, a group of Georgia citizens stormed Frank’s prison farm, abducting and hanging him, with Frank becoming the first and only Jew lynched in American history.

Naturally, Frank’s killing was roundly denounced in the national media that had long promoted his cause. But even in those quarters, there may have been a significant difference between public and private sentiments. No newspaper in the country had more strongly championed Frank’s innocence than the New York Times of Adolph Ochs. Yet according to the personal diary of one of the Times editors, Ochs privately despised Frank, and perhaps even greeted his lynching with a sense of relief. No effort was ever made by Frank’s wealthy supporters to bring any of the lynching party to justice.

Although I have now come to regard the NOI volume as the most persuasive and definitive text on the Frank case, I naturally considered conflicting works before reaching this conclusion.

For nearly a half-century, the leading scholarly account of the incident had probably been Leonard Dinnerstein’s book The Leo Frank Case, first published in 1966, and Dinnerstein, a University of Arizona professor specializing in Jewish history, entirely supported Frank’s innocence. But although the work won a national award, carries glowing blurbs from several prestigious publications, and has surely graced the reading lists of endless college courses, I was not at all impressed. Among other things, the book appears to be the original source of some of the most lurid examples of alleged anti-Semitic public outbursts that apparently have no basis in reality and seem to have been simply fabricated by the author given his lack of any citations; the NOI authors note these stories have been quietly abandoned by all recent researchers. Even leaving aside such likely falsifications, which were widely cited by later writers and heavily contaminated the historical record, I found the short Dinnerstein work rather paltry and even pitiful when compared to that of its NOI counterpart.

A far longer and more substantial recent work was Steve Oney’s 2003 And the Dead Shall Rise, which runs nearly 750 pages and won the National Jewish Book Award, the Southern Book Critics Circle Prize, and the American Bar Association’s Silver Gavel, probably establishing itself as today’s canonical text on the historical incident. Oney had been a longtime Atlanta journalist and I was favorably impressed by his narrative skill, along with the numerous fascinating vignettes he provided to illustrate the Southern history of that general era. He also seemed a cautious researcher, drawing heavily upon the primary sources and avoiding much of the falsified history of the last century, while not entirely suppressing the massive evidence of bribery and perjury employed by the Frank forces.

But although Oney does mention much of this information, he strangely fails to connect the dots. For example, although he occasionally mentions some of the funds spent on Frank’s behalf, he never attempts to convert them into present-day equivalents, leaving a naive reader to assume that such trivial amounts could not possibly have been used to pervert the course of justice. Furthermore, his entire book is written in chronological narrative form, with no footnotes provided in the text, and a large portion of the content being entirely extraneous to any attempt to determine Frank’s guilt or innocence, contrasting very sharply with the more scholarly style of the NOI authors.

To my mind, a central element of the Frank case was the massive financial temptations being offered by Frank’s Jewish backers, and the huge number of Atlanta citizens, both high and low, who apparently shifted their positions on Frank’s guilt in eager hopes of capturing some of that largess. But although this important theme was heavily emphasized in the NOI book, Oney seems to mostly avoid this obvious factor, perhaps even for personal reasons. Print publications have suffered massive cutbacks in recent years and I noticed on the book flap that although Oney is described as a longtime Atlanta journalist, he had subsequently relocated to Los Angeles. Once I checked, I immediately discovered that Oney’s book had became the basis for an independent film entitled The People v. Leo Frank, and I wonder whether his hopes of capturing a sliver of Hollywood’s vast lucre may not have encouraged him to so strongly suggest Frank’s innocence. Would an account of Leo Frank as rapist and murderer ever be likely to reach the silver screen? The quiet influence of financial considerations is no different today than it was a century ago, and this factor must be taken into account when evaluating historical events.

The NOI authors devote nearly all of their lengthy book to a careful analysis of the Frank case provided in suitably dispassionate form, but a sense of their justifiable outrage does occasionally poke through. In the years prior to Frank’s killing, many thousands of black men throughout the South had been lynched, often based on a slender thread of suspicion, with few of these incidents receiving more than a few sentences of coverage in a local newspaper, and large numbers of whites had also perished under similar circumstances. Meanwhile, Frank had received benefit of the longest trial in modern Southern history, backed by the finest trial lawyers that money could buy, and based on overwhelming evidence had been sentenced to death for the rape and murder of a young girl. But when Frank’s legal verdict was carried out by extra-judicial means, he immediately became the most famous lynching victim in American history, perhaps even attracting more media attention than all those thousands of other cases combined. Jewish money and Jewish media established him as a Jewish martyr who thereby effectively usurped the victimhood of the enormous number of innocent blacks who were killed both before and after him, none of whom were ever even recognized as individuals.

As Prof. Shahak has effectively demonstrated, traditional Talmudic Judaism regarded all non-Jews as being sub-human, with their lives possessing no value. Given that Frank’s backers were followers of Reform Judaism, it seems quite unlikely that they accepted this doctrine or were even aware of its existence. But religious traditions of a thousand years standing can easily become embedded within a culture, and such unrecognized cultural sentiments may have easily shaped their reaction to Frank’s legal predicament.

Influential historical accounts of the Frank case and its aftermath have contained lurid tales of the rampant public anti-Semitism visited upon Atlanta’s Jewish community in the wake of the trial, even claiming that a substantial portion of the population was forced to flee as a consequence. However, a careful examination of the primary source evidence, including the contemporaneous newspaper coverage, provides absolutely no evidence of this, and it appears to be entirely fictional.

The NOI authors note that prior to Frank’s trial American history had been virtually devoid of any evidence of significant anti-Semitism, with the previous most notable incident being the case of an extremely wealthy Jewish financier who was refused service at a fancy resort hotel. But by totally distorting the Frank case and focusing such massive national media coverage on his plight, Jewish leaders around the country succeeded in fabricating a powerful ideological narrative despite its lack of reality, perhaps intending the story to serve as a bonding experience to foster Jewish community cohesion.

As a further example of the widely promoted but apparently fraudulent history, the Jewish writers who have overwhelmingly dominated accounts of the Frank case have frequently claimed that it sparked the revival of the Ku Klux Klan soon afterward, with the group of citizens responsible for Frank’s 1915 lynching supposedly serving as the inspiration for William Simmons’ reestablishment of that organization a couple of years later. But there seems no evidence for this. Indeed, Simmons strongly emphasized the philo-Semitic nature of his new organization, which attracted considerable Jewish membership.

The primary factor behind the rebirth of the KKK was almost certainly the 1917 release of D.W. Griffith’s overwhelmingly popular landmark film Birth of a Nation, which glorified the Klan of the Reconstruction Era. Given that the American film industry was so overwhelmingly Jewish at the time and the film’s financial backers and leading Southern distributors came from that same background, it could be plausibly argued that the Jewish contribution to the creation of the 1920s Klan was a very crucial one, while the revenue from the film’s distribution throughout the South actually financed Samuel Goldwyn’s creation of MGM, Hollywood’s leading studio.

In their introduction, the NOI authors make the fascinating point that the larger historical meaning of the Frank case in American racial history has been entirely lost. Prior to that trial, it was unprecedented for Southern courts to allow black testimony against a white man, let alone against a wealthy man being tried on serious charges; but the horrific nature of the crime and Conley’s role as the sole witness required a break from that longstanding tradition. Thus, the authors not unreasonably argued that the Frank case may have been as important to the history of black progress in America as such landmark legal verdicts as Plessy v. Ferguson or Brown v. Board. But since almost the entire historical narrative has been produced by fervent Jewish advocates, these facts have been completely obscured and the case entirely misrepresented as an example of anti-Semitic persecution and public murder.

Let us summarize what seems to be the solidly established factual history of the Frank case, quite different than the traditional narrative. There is not the slightest evidence that Frank’s Jewish background was a factor behind his arrest and conviction, nor the death sentence he received. The case set a remarkable precedent in Southern courtroom history with the testimony of a black man playing a central role in a white man’s conviction. From the earliest stages of the murder investigation, Frank and his allies continually attempted to implicate a series of different innocent blacks by planting false evidence and using bribes to solicit perjured testimony, while the exceptionally harsh racial rhetoric that Frank and his attorneys directed towards those blacks was presumably intended to provoke their public lynching. Yet despite all these attempts by the Frank forces to play upon the notorious racial sentiments of the white Southerners of that era, the latter saw through these schemes and Frank was the one sentenced to hang for his rape and murder of that young girl.

Now suppose that all the facts of this famous case were exactly unchanged except that Frank had been a white Gentile. Surely the trial would be ranked as one of the greatest racial turning points in American history, perhaps even overshadowing Brown v. Board because of the extent of popular sentiment, and it would have been given a central place in all our modern textbooks. Meanwhile, Frank, his lawyers, and his heavy financial backers would probably be cast as among the vilest racial villains in all of American history for their repeated attempts to foment the lynching of various innocent blacks so that a wealthy white rapist and murderer could walk free. But because Frank was Jewish rather than Christian, this remarkable history has been completely inverted for over one hundred years by our Jewish-dominated media and historiography.

These are the important consequences that derive from control of the narrative and the flow of information, which allows murderers to be transmuted into martyrs and villains into heroes. The ADL was founded just over a century ago with the central goal of preventing a Jewish rapist and killer from being held legally accountable for his crimes, and over the decades, it eventually metastasized into a secret political police force not entirely dissimilar from the widely despised East German Stasi, but with its central goal seeming to be the maintenance of overwhelming Jewish control in a society that is 98% non-Jewish.

We should ask ourselves whether it is appropriate for an organization with such origins and such recent history to be granted enormous influence over the distribution of information across our Internet.

The lengthy 2018 article I’d published attracted considerable readership and more than 750 comments. Perhaps partly as a consequence, a few months later Amazon purged the scholarly book on the Leo Frank case that had so impressed me, ironically doing so during Black History Month. However, it’s still available for sale on the NOI website.

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.