The lynching of Leo Frank

Leo Frank superintended the National Pencil Company in Atlanta, where thirteen-year-old Mary Phagan was found murdered in 1913. Frank, a Jewish man from New York, was convicted on contested evidence in a trial conducted amid open antisemitic agitation - crowds outside the courthouse, and a press campaign led by the populist Tom Watson. The prosecution's central witness was Jim Conley, a Black janitor whom many historians since have considered the more likely killer; that a Georgia jury preferred a Black witness's word to a white defendant's is a measure of how far outside the circle of whiteness Frank was placed.

Governor John Slaton reviewed the record and commuted the sentence to life imprisonment in June 1915. He was burned in effigy and left the state. On the night of 16 August twenty-five men from Marietta, calling themselves the Knights of Mary Phagan and including a former governor, a judge and a sheriff, drove to the prison farm at Milledgeville, took Frank from his cell and hanged him near Phagan's hometown the next morning.

No one was prosecuted; photographs of the body were sold as postcards. The case ran in both directions: the Anti-Defamation League was founded during the trial, and three months after the lynching the Ku Klux Klan was reborn on Stone Mountain, with several of the Knights of Mary Phagan present. Georgia granted Frank a posthumous pardon in 1986, citing the state's failure to protect him rather than his innocence.