A revival of the musical “Parade” is coming to Sacramento and San Francisco this month.
The show, which debuted in 1998, is based on the true story of Leo Frank, a Jewish man living in Atlanta in the early 20th century who was convicted of the murder of a teenage girl and then lynched by an antisemitic mob on Aug. 17, 1915.
It’s widely believed now — although admittedly not by everyone — that he was innocent and possibly framed by the real perpetrator.
Frank was tried, convicted and sentenced to death, but divided public opinion led Georgia’s governor to commute that sentence to life in prison. Frank died anyway when a group of men broke into the prison, kidnapped him and strung him up on an oak tree.
The trial and death of Frank — an educated, urban Jewish man — was of huge interest to our readers during his trial and in the dreadful aftermath of the lynching.
In spring 1914, a year after he was accused of murder, we carried this explainer of the facts of the case:
“On the morning of Sunday, April 27, 1913, the body of Mary Phagan, a fourteen-year-old girl [she is also reported as 13], was found in the basement of the pencil factory of which Frank was the superintendent by Newt Lee, the negro night watchman. Marks on the throat indicated she had been strangled. Two notes found beside the body, alleged to have been written by the girl, said she was the victim of criminal assault.”
Our article explained that Frank was first interviewed by police as the last person known to have seen Phagan alive when he paid her wages.
“Frank’s reputation up to this time never had been publicly impugned,” our article stated. “He was an honor graduate of Cornell University and was president of the Atlanta branch of the B’nai B’rith, a position which, although under sentence of death, he still holds. Among the Jews of the community he still is highly esteemed. Owing to these facts some explanation is needed of the conditions which led to Frank being accused of so terrible a crime on the slight suspicion furnished by his admission that he was the last person to see Mary Phagan alive.”
Several unsolved murders weighed on Atlanta, the article said, and the police felt they needed to solve this one. But there was also an insidious antisemitism in the case, our article argued.
“Mary Phagan was young — she was white. The police understood that they must do something. Three or four days after Frank had been arrested, a lawyer of considerable popularity made the charge that the police department was unwilling to proceed against Frank because members of the department had been subsidized.”
In other words, the lawyer alleged that the police had been paid off to let a Jew go free.
“There is no evidence of any basis for this charge. However, it was believed by many thousands of persons,” according to our article.
Likewise, there was no evidence to support accusations that Frank was a sexual predator. It also remains an open question whether Phagan was sexually assaulted. However, at the time of Frank’s trial in July and August of 1913, the prosecution said that rape was a motive for the murder — something that may have fueled the mob that later lynched him.
The police also questioned James Conley, a Black man who worked as a “sweeper,” or janitor, in the factory. He allegedly told different stories before implicating Frank, and some historians consider him a candidate as the perpetrator.
According to a research paper published in the Journal of American History, scholars “have argued that this break in the general pattern of lynching — the murder not of a rural African American, but of a prominent, metropolitan white — can be explained only in light of the social tensions unleashed by the growth of industry and cities in the turn-of-the-century South. These circumstances made a Jewish employer a more fitting scapegoat for disgruntled whites than the other leading suspect in the case, a black worker,” Nancy McClean, a history professor at Northwestern, wrote in 1991.
Just months before Frank was lynched, we wrote in 1915 that “in the trial of Frank the common law doctrine which establishes a presumption of innocence in the case of an accused was entirely ignored and authority became amenable to a race-prejudiced mob spirit.”
Since the mob was mostly white, here “race” meant Jewish.
Much of the antisemitism surrounding the case was incited by Tom Watson, a populist lawyer who went on to become a U.S. senator. When he died in 1922, we published a scathing obituary:
“Since his election to the Senate, Watson had indulged in no anti-Semitic attacks, like those which blackened his record during the agitation preceding the assassination of Leo Frank by a masked gang of Georgia cutthroats. His chief journalistic efforts have, in recent years, been anti-Catholic, but those who have followed his career ascribe to his slanderous and inflammatory utterances, the death of Frank and the anti-Semitic and anti-Catholic wave which swept the South, culminating in the recent Ku Klux Klan resurrection.” (Watson also supported ending the right to vote for Black people.)
But it wasn’t only antisemitism that was at play. The case was also imbued with ugliness about class and race. McClean’s paper makes the case that the idea of a young, innocent factory worker killed for lust by her boss triggered deep rage among Southerners of the working class who otherwise felt powerless. And Frank’s final statement during the trial as printed in our newspaper used anti-Black racism to argue — for the last time, and in vain — that he was innocent: “Where the testimony of southern white women of unimpeachable character is branded as false by the prosecution, disregarded by the jury, and the perjured vaporings of a black brute alone accepted as the whole truth; where a mob crying for blood invaded the courtroom and became the dominant factor in what should have been a solemn judicial trial. Oh, shame — that these things are true.”
Even today, the case remains fodder for antisemites. There is a website dedicated to maintaining the guilty verdict as unshakeable, describing any claims to the contrary as “Jewish tribal hysteria.” It’s no wonder that the Frank case was considered an impetus to the creation of the Anti-Defamation League.
With “Parade,” Frank’s story is back on the stage. The drama of the production and the love story it portrays between Frank and his wife, Lucille, create emotional depth, but the blunt facts of his death remain.
At the end of the day, this is the tragic story of a real person. The grisly proof of this are the photos in the Library of Congress that show men milling around a tree in a forested glade, casually glancing either at the camera or what is hanging from it: Leo Frank’s body.