Wednesday, August 18, 2010

Flashback, August 1915: Georgia Mob Lynches Leo Frank


In Milledgeville, Ga., arguably America’s most famous convict, Leo Frank, was dragged out in the middle of the night from a state prison hospital. His 25 captors then managed to escape detection from the prison gun tower, as well as police in multiple jurisdictions, as they completed the second half of a journey to Marietta, hometown of his alleged victim, where Frank was strung up from a tree and lynched.

How Frank’s murderers—credibly rumored, even at the time, to include some of Atlanta’s most prominent citizens—could escape notice was only one of many mysterious aspects of this case, one of the worst miscarriages of justice in American legal history.

These days, Milledgeville would, I think, much rather be known as the longtime adult home of writer Flannery O’Connor, whose family farm, Andalusia, lies just outside the town outskirts.

But O’Connor—who, as a Roman Catholic, shared outsider status with the Jewish Frank in predominantly Protestant Georgia—wrote a book whose title carried uncanny resonance for this horrible crime: The Violent Bear It Away.

American anti-Semitism was not—and is not—rare. But Leo Frank appears to be the only known American Jew ever lynched. And it was for a crime he never committed—the murder of a 13-year-old girl, Mary Phagan, who had left her home 2 ½ years before to pick up her wages at the pencil factory he managed, and who never made it to her planned next destination: the local Confederate Day Parade.

Frank’s distress when police told him of the crime, along with his acknowledgement that he had given her her wages on the day of her death, made him the last person known to have seen her alive. But it was Georgia’s ambitious solicitor general, Hugh Dorsey, who made Frank’s own death a certainty: ignoring or suppressing exculpatory evidence, whipping the populace into a murderous frenzy with tilted testimony from others, by:

* Telling the grand jury that Frank was both homosexual and a molester of little girls;

* Comparing Frank to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde;


* Informing the grand jury that a rape had occurred, when that determination had been made not by a medical examiner but by a police officer and undertaker;


* Inducing the police to arrest people who made statements favorable to Frank, then holding them in custody until those statements were retracted;

* Persuading another grand jury not to indict an African-American janitor at the factory, Jim Conley—who would become his star witness against Frank—for the murder.

The case was stacked against Frank, from misleading trial testimony, to sensationalist newspaper coverage, to a populist-turned-demagogue (future Senator Thomas Watson) using the case to help revive the Ku Klux Klan, to a judge so fearful of angry mobs that he sentenced Frank to death.

Most extraordinarily, in a society in which an African-American’s word was never taken over a white’s at a trial—and in a case in which this particular African-American gave four different versions of events to the police—the state chose to accept Conley’s word over Frank’s. In fact, it was the first time in the racist South that a black man's testimony was used to convict a white man. The closest thing to a motive for this was offered by historian Leonard Dinnerstein, who noted: “At this particular time and in this particular case resentment against a symbol of alien industrialism took precedence over the usual Negro prejudice.”

Surmounting his original jittery responses to police questioning, Frank—an alien in Southern society—grew increasingly strong in his protestations of innocence. Those responses continued through the night of his death. Some of his captors were persuaded at that point that he was telling the truth, but they ended up acquiescing in the larger group’s murderous rage.

For more than 70 years, the conviction steadily mounted that Frank was innocent and Conley was lying. Finally, in 1984, the most telling blow yet to Frank’s conviction was dealt by the deathbed tale of 85-year-old Alonzo Mann, who had worked as an office boy in the factory and, he said, had stumbled upon the murder scene by accident at the time.

Mann had returned to the factory to retrieve something when he spotted Conley carrying Phagan’s corpse over his shoulder. Grabbing the boy with his free hand, Conley threatened to kill him, too, if he ever said anything about it.

At the urging of his parents, Mann kept silent throughout the trial and the ensuing decades. Finally, his conscience would not allow him to die without speaking the truth about the controversial case.

Fans of film, television and theater will likely have at least some familiarity with this notorious crime. Within a year of the lynching, a full-length silent feature and a documentary short had been released. But the most prominent examples of its influence in popular culture include the following:

* The 1937 Mervyn LeRoy film They Won’t Forget, a thinly fictionalized treatment of the tale, featuring 17-year-old Lana Turner in her movie debut as the murder victim;

* The 1988 television miniseries The Murder of Mary Phagan, starring Peter Gallagher as Frank and Jack Lemmon as Gov. John Slaton, a profile in courage who, believing that Frank had been railroaded, commuted his sentence—and paid the price at the polls by losing the next gubernatorial election to none other than Dorsey;

* The 1998 Broadway musical Parade, with a book by Alfred Uhry and music and lyrics by Jason Robert Brown.

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