The Leo Frank case, 1913 to 1915

What happened

Mary Phagan was thirteen years old and worked at the National Pencil Company in Atlanta. On April 26, 1913, she went to the factory to collect her wages, and her body was found in the cellar that night. ¹ She had been beaten and strangled. ¹ Leo Frank, the factory's superintendent and the last person known to have seen her alive, was arrested three days later, on April 29. ¹ He was 31 and Jewish, which in Atlanta in 1913 meant he was both a Northerner in the local imagination and an employer of young white girls in a mill town's worth of anxiety about exactly that. ⁵

The prosecution, led by Solicitor General Hugh M. Dorsey, built its case on Jim Conley, a Black janitor at the factory who gave at least four contradictory affidavits about his own role and was held in solitary confinement for six weeks before trial. ¹ Conley testified that Frank had asked him to help move the body. Frank's lawyers could not shake him on the stand. ¹ The trial ran about four weeks, and on August 25, 1913, the jury convicted Frank after a few hours of deliberation. ⁵ Judge Leonard Roan sentenced him to hang. ⁵ Crowds outside the courthouse had been calling for exactly that throughout. ⁵

Frank's team filed three appeals to the Georgia Supreme Court and two to the United States Supreme Court, arguing procedure rather than innocence. ¹ The federal question reached the Court as Frank v. Mangum, decided April 19, 1915, which held that Frank's conviction had not violated the Fourteenth Amendment even given the claims about the atmosphere in the courtroom. ⁶ Justices Oliver Wendell Holmes and Charles Evans Hughes dissented. ¹ Holmes wrote that "mob law does not become due process of law by securing the assent of a terrorized jury," and argued that federal courts had to look at the facts rather than defer to the state's own account of them. ⁶

That left the governor. John M. Slaton read more than 10,000 pages of the record and went to the factory himself. ¹ He concluded Frank was innocent and, on June 21, 1915, commuted the death sentence to life imprisonment. ¹⁵ Armed mobs moved through Atlanta and Jewish merchants boarded up their storefronts. ⁵ Slaton left Georgia. ¹

On the night of August 16, 1915, about twenty-five men calling themselves the Knights of Mary Phagan took Frank out of the state prison farm at Milledgeville and drove him across the state. ¹ On August 17 they hanged him from a tree near Marietta, Phagan's hometown. ⁵ Close to 3,000 people came to look at the body the next morning. ¹ No one was ever prosecuted for it. ¹

Why it still matters

The Anti-Defamation League was founded in Chicago in 1913 by Sigmund Livingston, a lawyer who had emigrated from Germany and had assumed the prejudices he grew up with did not cross the ocean. ²³ The ADL is careful about the chronology, and it is worth repeating accurately: the organization was conceived before Frank's arrest and trial, and the case was not its impetus. ³ What the case did was confirm the premise. The ADL's own reading is that the trial and the lynching demonstrated that America had imported the European stereotypes and conspiracy theories about Jews wholesale, including the blood libel logic of the Jew who preys on Christian children. ³ We have a separate explainer on the blood libel itself, and another on the Dreyfus affair, which ran on parallel rails in France two decades earlier.

The other institution that came out of the case was the second Ku Klux Klan. William J. Simmons and sixteen other men burned a cross on top of Stone Mountain on Thanksgiving 1915, weeks after the lynching, and the New Georgia Encyclopedia names two catalysts for the revival: D.W. Griffith's film The Birth of a Nation and the Frank case. ⁷ Several of the men who had been in Marietta in August took part in the Stone Mountain ceremony. ¹ The revived Klan was not the Reconstruction original. It ran on white supremacy plus anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic, and antisemitic politics, and it drew roughly 5 million members nationally by the early 1920s, with about 156,000 in Georgia alone by 1925. ⁷ The Georgia number had collapsed to 1,400 by 1930. ⁷

Tom Watson deserves his own line. A former Populist and publisher of the Jeffersonian, he ran a sustained antisemitic campaign against Frank in print, and his circulation went up on the strength of it. ¹ That mechanism has not aged out.

The pardon took seventy-one years and arrived sideways. In 1982, Alonzo Mann, an eighty-three-year-old man who had been a fourteen-year-old errand boy at the factory, said publicly that he had seen the janitor carrying Mary Phagan's body toward the basement, and that the janitor had threatened to kill him if he talked. ² The Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles refused to act in 1983, saying it was "impossible to decide conclusively the guilt or innocence of Frank," a refusal that the ADL, the American Jewish Committee, and the National Jewish Community Relations Advisory Council all called shocking. ⁴ The ADL's Southern Counsel Charles Wittenstein and ADL leader Dale Schwartz kept the legal campaign running. ² On March 11, 1986, all five members of the board, chaired by Wayne Snow Jr., signed a pardon. ²⁴

The wording matters, and it is the reason this case still generates argument. The board did not say Frank was innocent. It granted the pardon "in recognition of the state's failure to protect the person of Leo M. Frank and thereby preserve his opportunity for continued legal appeal," and for the state's failure to bring his killers to justice. ⁴ That is a pardon for what Georgia did, not a finding about what Frank did. ² People who believe Frank was guilty still cite that distinction; people who believe he was framed point out that a man lynched before his appeals ran out cannot be cleared by a process that was taken away from him. The conviction itself has never been vacated.

It may not stay that way. In April 2025, a spokesman for the Fulton County District Attorney's office said the Frank case file sits with the office's Conviction Integrity Unit, established in 2019, and that a decision would be announced when the review is finished. ⁸ That was the same week Alfred Uhry's musical Parade, which dramatizes the case, was playing the Fox Theatre in Atlanta. ⁸¹

The words you'll hear

The National Pencil Company. The Atlanta factory Leo Frank superintended, where Mary Phagan came to collect her pay on April 26, 1913, and where her body was found in the cellar the same night. ¹

Frank v. Mangum. The Supreme Court decision of April 19, 1915, holding that Frank's conviction did not violate due process, remembered mostly for the Holmes dissent on mob-dominated trials. ⁶

Commutation. Governor John M. Slaton's June 21, 1915 order reducing Frank's death sentence to life imprisonment after he reviewed more than 10,000 pages of the record and concluded Frank was innocent. ¹⁵

The Knights of Mary Phagan. The roughly twenty-five men who took Frank from the Milledgeville prison farm and hanged him near Marietta on August 17, 1915. Several later joined the Stone Mountain ceremony that launched the second Klan. ¹⁵

The second Klan. The organization William J. Simmons founded with sixteen others on Stone Mountain on Thanksgiving 1915, distinguished from the Reconstruction-era Klan by its antisemitism, anti-Catholicism, and nativism, and by a national membership near 5 million in the early 1920s. ⁷

Posthumous pardon. The March 11, 1986 act of the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles, granted for the state's failure to protect Frank and to prosecute his killers rather than as a finding of innocence. ²⁴

Conviction Integrity Unit. The Fulton County District Attorney's review body, created in 2019, which held the Frank case file as of April 2025 with no decision announced. ⁸