The Real history Upon Which This Film Was Based

Approximately 100 years ago one of the saddest and most horrific outrages and tragedies in modern American history occurred. August 17, 1915 was the culmination of the Leo Frank case and marks the date of his murder by lynching.

As I recall Robert Young saying as a character in a movie about another such occurrence. That's history. They don't teach it in school. But it's real American history just the same.

On April 26, 1913 in Atlanta, Georgia, a young white Christian girl (Mary Phagan) was raped and murdered at the factory where she worked, by a black janitor. He however was overlooked and allowed to go unpunished, even serving as a prosecution witness, despite a long criminal history.

Leo Frank, a Jewish man, was the manager of that small facility which manufactured pencils. With no proof or legitimate witnesses Frank was arrested, speedily tried, convicted and sentenced to death, amid large and frequent anti-Semitic protest marches.

Upon investigation, the outrageous conduct during the trial was revealed and the execution was put in abeyance. After about 2 years the Governor of Georgia intervened, not to overturn the verdict or call for a retrial, but to commute the sentence to life imprisonment.

This modest redress of injustice so outraged the citizens of the area that they broke into the jail where Frank was being held, and encountering no resistance, kidnapped the prisoner. This group of citizens, called the Knights of Mary Phagan, held him overnight, transported Frank about 75 miles back near the location where Mary Phagan had met her death, and then staged a public lynching the next morning.

The incident sparked both a rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan, and at the same time the founding of the ADL, The Anti-Defamation League. Klan led and inspired anti-Jewish riots broke out across the entire region. These acts of violence and intimidation decimated, and in essence expelled from the American South, what had once been a sizable Jewish population.

No one was ever arrested or punished for the hanging. The man who had actually murdered Mary Phagan was never arrested and died of old age, and the Governor who issued the commutation of sentence never held elective office again.

Almost 70 years after the trial, a now elderly man, who had been a teenager at the time, named Alonzo Mann, came forward to exonerate Frank. Mann said he had seen the actual killer, a man named Jim Conley, dragging the dead body away. Mann said Conley had threatened to murder him and that his mother had advised him to keep silent.

However Mann said he eventually had to come forward as he did not want to go to his death with this on his conscience. Despite all that investigations had uncovered and the testimony of Mann, the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles refused to overturn the conviction of Frank, but did eventually agree to a pardon of sorts based on the state's failure to protect his safety while a prisoner in a state facility.

While doing some fact checking, I was saddened, and even somewhat shocked to realize, that even today a number of websites exist that are dedicated to keeping alive the lie that Leo Frank was justly dealt with, and simultaneously promulgating all of the anti-Semitic canards and calumnies that have existed throughout recorded history.