This week marks the anniversary of a low point in American Jewish history. One hundred years ago Leo Frank, a manager at the National Pencil Company in Atlanta, having been wrongly convicted of murder in a trial steeped in overt anti-Semitism, was kidnapped from prison, driven seven hours across Georgia, and lynched in a public park. The murderous mob included a former governor, former and then-current mayors of Marietta, Georgia (the scene of the murder), and former and then-current sheriffs, among other community leaders. The gang of bigoted murderers stood proudly for pictures with Frank’s corpse as it hung from a tree.
During Leo Frank’s farcical trial two years earlier, shouts of “hang the Jew” rang out from the gallery and were reported in the press. After the lynching, half of Atlanta’s Jewish community, the largest in the American South, fled the state. Many of those who remained hid aspects of their Jewish observance. And a leader of the lynch mob shortly revived the Ku Klux Klan by burning a cross atop Georgia’s iconic Stone Mountain.
The unrepentant anti-Semitism on open display during Leo Frank’s trial and in the aftermath was commonplace in early 20th-century America. The unchecked hostility against Jews gave rise to the Anti-Defamation League with its mission to fight all bigotry, especially anti-Semitism.
Those events may seem far-removed from the place of relative privilege that many American Jews enjoy today. Jews unremarkably serve on the Supreme Court and fill senior leadership positions in Congress, and a Pew survey recently showed Jews are the most admired religious group in the United States. Certainly anti-Semitic attitudes persist — recent ADL polling shows that 10 percent of Americans are infected with these bigoted views. Shocking incidents still occur, such as the deadly assault on a JCC in Kansas in 2014, and according to the FBI, Jews are targeted in hate crimes more often than all other religious groups combined.
However, today these views and events are widely condemned, and hate crimes are prosecuted.
As for threats to the American Jewish community, a new ADL report makes clear that white supremacists are the most violent among domestic extremist movements. In the last 10 years, white supremacists committed about 83 percent of the extremist-related murders in the United States, were involved in approximately 52 percent of shootouts between extremists and police, regularly engage in terrorism, and are heavily involved with “traditional” as well as “ideologically based” criminal activity.
So what is the meaning of Leo Frank’s murder a century later? First, we must appreciate our progress. While serious threats to the Jewish community endure, the notion that public officials would abide, let alone commit, such murderous anti-Semitic activities is unfathomable in America today.
The anniversary of Leo Frank’s murder reminds us of the tremendous impact that hate crimes have on an entire community; remember that the lynching precipitated an exodus by Jews who felt they, too, might be targeted. Today, five states (Arkansas, Indiana, Georgia, Wyoming and South Carolina, where nine African Americans were murdered last month because of their race) have no hate-crime laws on their books. Seven states do not consider crimes based on sexual orientation, gender, gender identity or disability a hate crime. Many other states have hate-crime statutes that fail to protect victims based on various personal characteristics.
Hate crimes send messages of terror, exclusion and lawlessness. Hate-crime laws send countervailing messages of acceptance, inclusion and consequences for terrorizing entire communities. For these reasons, ADL joins a diverse group of civil rights organizations in launching 50 States Against Hate (#50StatesAgainstHate), a campaign to ensure that everyone in America will benefit from the legal protections of hate-crime laws and realize freedom from the fear of hate-inspired violence.
As a tribute to the memory of Leo Frank, we must remain vigilant, we must dedicate ourselves to stand for justice, and we must act now.
Seth Brysk is the Central Pacific regional director of the Anti-Defamation League, based in San Francisco.