Story of anti-Semitic lynching as brutal now as 90 years ago

Ninety years ago, in Atlanta, a 13-year-old factory worker named Mary Phagan was sexually abused and brutally murdered.

Following the murder, an innocent Jewish Atlantan — the superintendent of the pencil factory where Mary worked — Leo Frank, was arrested, tried, convicted and eventually lynched in an anti-Semitic episode that shocked and outraged the fair-minded people of America.

Author Steve Covey has painstakingly re-created the murder of Phagan, the trial of Frank and the city of Atlanta as it was in 1913. It was a place of child labor, huge class distinctions, seeming acceptance of Jews yet smoldering anti-Semitism, racial separation and bigotry. Atlanta was a city with pretensions of culture and art, yet seething with intolerance and violence.

The murder and rape of young Phagan, a white girl from a poor background, was by the hands of a fellow employee named James Conley, a black man who had a long criminal record and who evaded a murder indictment by claiming to have assisted Frank only in disposing of Phagan's body. Superbly coached by the Atlanta district attorney and a man of intelligence and cunning, Conley convinced an all-white jury of Frank's guilt — though all evidence pointed to Conley himself as the murderer.

For all of their hatred of blacks, the Atlanta of both the elite D.A.'s office and of the white working class chose to believe Conley's story and to disbelieve the Cornell-educated Frank. Georgians would ascribe to Frank every anti-Semitic stereotype of the time.

The real Frank — who was faithful to his wife — was replaced with the false image of a sexual predator by a power-hungry district attorney. Frank, whose uncle had fought for the Confederacy and whose Jewish wife was Georgia-born, was labeled as a rich, exploitative Jewish capitalist and outsider. Nothing he said could change those Georgians who were arrayed against him.

Even before then-Gov. Frank Slaton bravely commuted Frank's death sentence, the populist Tom Watson, who had run with William Jennings Bryan for vice president, jumped into the fray, whipping up mob frenzy against Frank and the Jewish people. In his newspaper, The Jeffersonian, Watson would write:

"Do the rich Jews want to create among the gentiles of this country the same deep dislike which they have created everywhere else? There must be some general cause for the universal feeling against Jews in Spain, in France, in Russia, in Poland and Hungary ...

"If they continue their rancor and villainous abuse of the people who wanted Leo Frank punished for his crime, they will create a tempest they cannot control ..."

Watson's editorials led, in great part, to Frank's death.

Yet, even in Georgia, there were courageous men and women who spoke out on Frank's behalf. Oney rightfully restores their place in history.

Oney's superb book is an invaluable contribution to the history of the South, to Jewish American history and to the often forgotten history of America itself.




"And the Dead Shall Rise," by Steve Covey (742 pages, Pantheon Books, $35).