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Leo Max Frank was an American man who became the only known Jew to be lynched on American soil. Leo Frank was born in Paris, Texas on April 17, 1884, to Rudolf and Rae Frank. His family moved to Brooklyn, New York, shortly after his birth. He was a student at Brooklyn Public Schools and Pratt Institute, and graduated from Cornell University.
Leo Frank earned an engineering degree at Cornell in 1906, and married Lucille Selig in 1910. Lucille came from a wealthy family of industrialists who two generations earlier had founded the first synagogue in Atlanta. An uncle of Frank’s was a Confederate veteran who owned a large share of National Pencil Factory. Through that connection, Frank was hired and promoted to factory superintendent. He had traveled to Massachusetts, New York, and Germany for further apprenticeships in pencil manufacturing. He was president of a local chapter of the B’nai Brith. The Franks moved in a cultured and privileged milieu whose leisure pursuits included opera, bridge and tennis.
The manager of a pencil factory in Atlanta, Georgia, Frank was convicted in the rape and murder of a pencil-factory worker, 13-year-old Mary Phagan. The case is widely regarded as having been a miscarriage of justice.It was the focus of many conflicting cultural pressures, and the jury’s conclusion represented in part, class and regional resentment of educated Northern industrialists who were perceived to be wielding too much power in the South, threatening southern culture and morality.The trial was sensationalized by the media. The Georgia politician and publisher Tom Watson used the case to build personal political power and support for a revival of the Ku Klux Klan.
Shortly after Frank’s conviction, new evidence emerged that cast doubt on his guilt. After the governor commuted his death sentence to life imprisonment, Frank was kidnapped from prison and lynched by a group of prominent citizens who called themselves the “Knights of Mary Phagan”. The group is reported to have included the son of a senator, a former governor, lawyers, and a prosecutor.
Tags: atlanta, biography, ku klux klan, leo frank, leo max frank, mary phagan
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