The Northern press, led by the New York Times, took up the story.
Striking as all this was, what happened next proved even more dramatic. A black witness had prevailed against a white defendant in a capital case in the Jim Crow South.
#MARIETTA CITY CEMETERY MARY PHAGAN TRIAL#
Following a monthlong trial in the heat of summer, an all-white jury accepted Conley’s word over that of the Yankee Jew and returned a guilty verdict. Conley added that Frank dictated the notes to him in an effort to pin the crime on another black employee. Jim Conley, the factory’s black janitor, claimed that Frank committed the murder when the girl rejected Frank’s sexual advances. Next to her body the police discovered two semiliterate notes that purported to have been written by her (“i wright while play with me,” read one) but were plainly the work of someone else. Mary Phagan, who toiled at a Forsyth Street pencil factory run by Frank, was found strangled to death in the factory basement not long after leaving Frank’s office with her weekly pay: $1.20. Was Leo Frank indeed innocent? Did he receive a fair trial? Did America’s Jews, especially those in the press, misplay their hand, inadvertently igniting the sectional hostility that doomed Frank? How did the lynch mob get away with such a brazen crime? Finally: Could it happen again?įrom today’s perspective, the case beggars belief. They came down here from New York and made movies and wrote stories.” So began the centennial of Atlanta’s most infamous criminal case.Įven after 100 years, the questions linger. As to why many now believe otherwise, Fields declared, “Money is power. After offering a prayer and placing a flower, Fields told Leo Hohmann of the Marietta Daily Journal that Frank, contrary to most contemporary thinking, was guilty as charged.
Stoner, and a founder of the anti-Semitic National States Rights Party. Fields, a former Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, an associate of the late racist politician J.B. Among this day’s visitors was eighty-year-old Edward R. Here, unresolved hostilities still erupt. Little Mary’s final resting place, with its hauntingly engraved stone (“Many an aching heart in Georgia beats for you, and many a tear, from eyes unused to weep, has paid you a tribute”), has long been a shrine.īut the girl’s mysterious death and the subsequent tragedy it inspired-the lynching of Leo Frank, a Cornell-educated Jewish industrialist convicted of her killing-make the site more than just a place for paying respects. All made their way to the grave of Mary Phagan, a thirteen-year-old child laborer murdered in a downtown Atlanta factory on April 26, 1913, exactly 100 years before. A Darlington, South Carolina, lawyer who’d been planning his trip for months. High school kids researching a history project. Throughout the rain-threatened spring morning, pilgrims kept arriving at the Marietta City Cemetery. Photograph courtesy of the Kenan Research Center at the Atlanta History Center
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