Still in the Shadow of Leo Frank
SIMONS, HOWARD
STILL IN THE SHADOW OF LEO FRANK HOWARD SIMONS The Leo Frank case had an especially profound effect on southern Jews—and they have not forgotten it to this day. Howard Simons' new book, Jewish...
...it's like Holocaust survivors who refuse to talk about their experiences at Auschwitz...
...It was a Saturday and he was working some extra hours to make a few extra dimes...
...Conley's lawyer, whose name was William Smith, a young criminal trial lawyer in Atlanta, went to Governor Slaton and told the governor that he knew that his client Conley was guilty and that Leo Frank was innocent and they couldn't let an innocent man hang...
...Today anti-Semitism takes a whole lot more subtle form than it did back in those days...
...I think there are a few people at the Jewish Home who were around here as youngsters during that era who remember some of this...
...His mother had also told him she was going to buy a hat, and if she was late, he could either stay and watch the parade or just go on home on the trolley...
...The murders occurred over a two-year period, 1979-1980...
...This was during the lunch hour...
...Supreme Court—I think it was a seven-to-two decision—said that the Supreme Court had no business telling a state how to run a criminal trial...
...Finally, the lawyer who represented Jim Conley, the black sweeper, went first to the trial judge and then to the then governor of Georgia, John Slaton...
...He went home and told his mother and stepfather what happened...
...In fact, the judge insisted, when they brought the jury verdict in, that Leo Frank not be present when they announced the verdict, because the judge presumed that the verdict would be innocent and that the mobs outside might just come in and do their own form of justice...
...Below are interviews with two southern Jews who talk about the Frank case: The first is with Dale M. Schwartz, a young Atlanta lawyer who represented a group of Jewish organizations that in the 1980s attempted to win a pardon for Frank from the Georgia pardon and parole board (Eventually, the board did grant a pardon, not because it doubted Frank's guilt, but on the strange ground that the state had failed to protect Frank from the lynch mob and had failed to bring Frank's lynchers to justice...
...And she left...
...Late that night, I think very late that night, a night watchman making rounds in the building came across her body in the basement, down in the coal bin, and called the police in...
...But one senses that underneath there are much more subtle forms of anti-Semitism and discrimination...
...Finally, Frank's body was sent back to Brooklyn...
...It's just much subtler than it used to be...
...She announced to Mr...
...It was a regular carnival atmosphere...
...In fact, the judge had no idea that Frank would be convicted, because there just was no evidence implicating him in the crime at all, other than Jim Conley's testimony...
...She had not worked full time the previous week because they had run out of copper...
...to care...
...So there was a growing resentment against the owners of these factories, particularly the northern Yankee Jewish owners...
...It truly was a panic, because the Jewish community was in a state of shock...
...Newspaper articles were being written demanding his pardon and his release, and it became a real cause for lots of different groups...
...In fact, at one time the town had been called Terminus...
...So the police officers asked Frank to come down in the elevator...
...Slaton was a very popular governor, and in Georgia in those days governors served two-year terms...
...For example, as the jury came in every day, the crowd outside was reported by the press to chant, "Hang the Jew or we'll hang you...
...Then in 1982, an eyewitness to the case came forward...
...The industrial revolution had come upon the United States, and mills were growing up everywhere, particularly in Atlanta...
...They were ostracized, by and large, by the older line people, who had done a very good job of assimilating into the Gentile community here in Atlanta...
...It manufactured lead pencils, not the mechanical kind, but the old-fashioned regular pencils...
...I think even the Christian community, which fully well expected the pardon would and should be issued, were mad about it...
...There had been a big parade downtown and she came down to collect her SI.10 pay envelope...
...You know, had alibis...
...You know, everything bad in life was blamed on the Jews...
...They had called themselves the Knights of Mary Phagan...
...He said no, it hadn't come in yet, but he expected it next week...
...As he ran out the door, he said that Conley hollered after him, "If you say anything about this, I'll kill you...
...You have to put it in context...
...It had recently been converted to electricity, and Frank had one of the few keys for the little box that would unlock the switch to turn the elevator on and off...
...He granted the commutation order and then took an around-the-world extended vacation...
...They came back and asked somebody in the family to tell them what that meant, and it means "Always the same" or "Nothing really changes...
...It's a fascinating story, because nobody believed that Leo Frank would be convicted of this crime...
...We have some 60 thousand Jewish people in the metropolitan area...
...When Conley saw him, he yelled at him and he told him to halt or stop or something and he lunged out to grab him...
...In fact, I have a picture in my office of Leo Frank hanging from a tree, and you can see the scar of the knife wound on his neck...
...I think there was a real depression going on in the farmlands...
...There was a package chute like a coal chute, that went down, and there was a trap door with a ladder you could climb down...
...And they said, "Naw, it will work itself out...
...Some white inmate had accused him of being a raper of young white Christian girls or something...
...But it was always customary to cut the body down from the tree immediately after the lynching and then everybody disappeared and went fishing...
...The scars are certainly still there...
...Jews are still not allowed in those country clubs...
...And you don't have to believe the testimony of this nigger if you don't want to, against the testimony of white witnesses...
...For years the Jewish community suppressed the story, and I think there were some people, particularly the older ones, who were horrified that we were bringing it up again...
...In the aftermath of the trial, the most vehement anti-Semitism came out...
...Now, the following morning, when they brought Leo Frank down to the factory, the police wanted to get down into the basement...
...They were prominent doctors, lawyers, dentists, bankers, store owners—that sort of thing...
...Ironically, there had been a whole wave of murders of young children in Atlanta back in those days, which repeated itself more recently.* And the newspapers had been openly calling for the district attorney's resignation...
...Something like an average of four blacks a month got lynched in Georgia during that era...
...So he was hell-bent to solve this crime...
...Rabbi Marks at the temple here in Atlanta and a friend of Leo Frank's accompanied the body on the train for burial in Brooklyn...
...He was startled because he saw Jim Conley carrying the limp body of this little blond girl, Mary Phagan, down the steps and into the main part of the factory, walking toward the chute to the basement...
...They cut the telephone lines and met with no resistance—his throat had been cut by another inmate in a fight in that institution just weeks earlier...
...The pardon was granted, said the board, because the state hadi failed to protect Leo Frank or to bring the lynchers to justice...
...His name was Hugh Dorsey and he wanted to run for governor, and this wasn't doing him any good...
...They were determined, I think, to convict Leo Frank...
...He said that Mr...
...He was from Brooklyn, New York...
...There were lots of windows being broken...
...There wasn't any bathroom down there...
...His body got trampled by the crowd...
...But still one senses down deep inside that there's still some anti-Semitism around...
...Another interesting phenomenon was that as a result of the Frank trial and the subsequent lynching of Leo Frank, the Ku Klux Klan was revitalized...
...Smith called a press conference and told that to the press, and pretty much got run out of town for having said that...
...The lawyer for Jim Conley went to the governor after having gone to the trial judge, who agreed to do something about it but then died before he had an opportunity to do so...
...senator as a result of this matter, were really doing diatribes against the Jewish community...
...The U.S...
...From the book Jewish Times: Voices of the American Jewish Experience by Houard Simons, published by Houghton Mifflin Company f.\ Marc joffe Rook...
...There was a phenomenon going on in Atlanta, and I guess throughout the South, although I'm not that much of a historian, but I've done a lot of reading on the Leo Frank era...
...But you have to think about what was going on back around 1910 to 1915 in the South, and in Atlanta in particular...
...It was a scapegoat kind of a thing...
...The cotton crops, which had been prosperous for so many years, were petering out...
...Frank left no children...
...In any event, he'd said he'd gone to the bathroom that morning in the bottom of the elevator shaft...
...We have some hope to go back to the board and try to get them to reconsider the matter and we are working on that...
...Frank had been married for about a year or two by the time this incident happened...
...the Yankee sweatshop owner"—all sorts of rumors about his sex life...
...Check back with him...
...It wasn't in the elevator shaft...
...Anyway, they got Frank out of this jail and brought him back to an oak tree that was within sight of the place where Mary Phagan had been born outside of Atlanta, and they lynched him from this tree...
...A distant cousin called me a few months ago and told me they'd been out to visit the cemetery plot that Leo Frank is buried in—nobody had been out there in years, apparently...
...It's been very interesting...
...At that point, several rabble-rousing newspapers, including one owned by Tom Watson, who later became a U.S...
...That company, through a series of acquisitions, later became the Scripto Corporation...
...Lonnie Mann got subpoenaed to come to the trial as one of the 139 witnesses for Leo Frank...
...Hundreds of newspaper editorials all over the country supported the pardon application...
...Frank was planning on raping this little girl when she came to collect her paycheck...
...Governor Slaton, while he was considering the commutation, had to call out the National Guard and lots of friends to guard the Governor's Mansion, because the Klan-type people were out there every night, burning crosses and raising hell and hanging him in effigy and things like that...
...Also, it's almost embarrassing to talk about this, but when the police found the body, it was near the bottom of the elevator shaft...
...For years they had suppressed this story...
...In fact, the little girl's body was so covered with soot and blood that when they found her with the lanterns, they couldn't tell if she was a white girl or a black girl...
...She asked him if the copper had arrived...
...Wayne Snow, chairman of the five-member Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles, commenting on the pardon, said, "Hopefully, this will put the Leo Frank case behind us and redress what was a very poor episode in the state's history...
...There is a Latin inscription, they told us, on his tombstone...
...He got so frightened that when they asked him his name he started stuttering...
...the Jewish community was shocked...
...Later, when they arrested Leo Frank, he told his mother again that he wanted to go tell the police what he saw...
...That really hasn't changed...
...Atlanta, up until that time, was primarily a transportation center...
...Prejudices against Negroes and Jews and Catholics, in particular...
...How has our attempt to get a pardon been greeted by the Jewish community and the non-Jewish community...
...that was the name of the little girl who had been murdered...
...Lynchings were not unusual in Georgia...
...That was the common thing to do...
...We brought Lonnie Mann to Atlanta...
...These were not necessarily yahoos or rednecks...
...The testimony was that the elevator wasn't turned on that weekend, and that nobody had used it, although Conley said that Frank unlocked the box and they took the body down to the basement...
...That was going on...
...The public really got riled up a lot...
...He'd never stuttered before, but he stuttered very, very badly and whispered...
...He finally moved away to Bristol, Virginia, and had a heart problem and a pacemaker installed...
...But after a while, it was almost like a catharsis, and once we let it out of the closet, so to speak, then people were interested in seeing that justice finally was done in the Frank case, which, of course, today has not yet been done...
...He said he had, in fact, gone to the bathroom early on Saturday morning after he first came to work...
...It was one of the lead stories throughout the United States that year...
...I believe in my heart he's innocent, antr-can't do that...
...It was what I call a Deutsche Jewish community...
...It was one of the last stops on the northern railroad, where southern farmers would bring their cotton into Atlanta...
...It's ironic that the Anti-Defamation League was formed and the Ku Klux Klan reborn in the same year, primarily as a result of the same incident...
...Lonnie Mann said he was scared to death...
...To this day there are some families that have preserved little pieces of this rope that they used to lynch Leo Frank...
...They've used them as Bible markers over the years...
...Elements of Russian and Polish Jews were just beginning to arrive in Atlanta...
...Frank what her payroll number was—she was number 51 or something like that...
...He says that when he got into the courthouse, there were thousands of people—the local newspapers estimated the crowds of more than five thousand outside the courthouse...
...Photographs were taken, and postcards were being sold...
...Nobody had any idea he knew anything about the case other than as a character witness for Frank...
...The second interview is with Cecil A. Alexander, a prominent Atlanta architect whose uncle was one of Frank's lawyers...
...I think it used to work with a rope pull...
...It was an old-fashioned elevator and it didn't have any springs in\ the bottom of it, and when the elevator landed on the bottom, it squashed the feces that were there, which somebody should have figured out would have proved that Conley was lying about using the elevator to take the body down...
...You can live in Atlanta, Georgia, and be Jewish and be very comfortable being Jewish in this city...
...Somebody told me, and I don't know if this is accurate or not, Rich's Department Store had a standing order to replace their plate glass windows every morning during this period...
...They let Frank hang from the tree for a number of hours...
...So Frank stayed in jail while they announced the verdict, which was the basis of an appeal...
...Well, he says that over the years he has tried to tell his story a number of times to reporters—he wound up owning a restaurant in downtown Atlanta down the street from the Journal-Constitution newspaper building...
...It said Semper idem...
...It was covered extensively by newspapers such as the jYew York Times and others around the country...
...Actually the effigy hanging came after he granted the commutation...
...Conley said that he helped Leo Frank carry the body across the floor of the third story of the factory, where the crime was supposed to have been committed, onto this new elevator and down into the basement of the building...
...People tore pieces of his clothing...
...Then a group of Jewish organizations got together and applied for a posthumous pardon for Leo Frank...
...I think of it on a small scale...
...When Conley was questioned the next day, he told the police he often went down to the basement to take a snooze and have a pull at his bottle...
...And that he would often go to the bathroom in the bottom of this elevator shaft...
...Leo Frank came to Atlanta about 1910, and at that time the Jewish community he found here was a very interesting community...
...They just suppressed it...
...It's pretty gauche nowadays in a Christian community to go around calling people Jews or kikes or Christ-killers or anything like that...
...They tried to tarnish his reputation in the newspapers...
...He wound up settling in Kansas someplace, and didn't come back to Atlanta for many, many years...
...if it was favorable to Leo Frank, people would boo...
...Nobody but Leo Frank...
...Eight years later, the Supreme Court reversed itself in that case and ruled that it was a violation of federal constitutional due process to try somebody in a mob-rule atmosphere—in the case with some young blacks from Alabama who had been tried and railroaded, so to speak...
...There are very few of these people left now...
...If it was something favorable to the prosecutor, everybody would cheer...
...The body was found in the basement in a large pool of blood and soot...
...Somebody was pretty prophetic 70 years ago to put that on Frank's tombstone...
...He borrowed nickels and dimes from people to buy corn whiskey and never paid them back...
...At first he denied any knowledge of the crime, and then he gave a series of four affidavits, all contradictory, but further and further implicating Leo Frank...
...They could barely hear his answers because there was so much noise and confusion there in the courthouse...
...Reprinted by permission...
...A lot of Jewish husbands sent their wives and kids out of the state...
...There was a very thriving Jewish community in the Atlanta that Leo Frank found when he arrived back in 1910, 1911...
...As I put it, they brought with them the bag and baggage of whatever prejudices they had out in the rural area...
...Lots of people were sent to Birmingham and Montgomery and New York and other places until things cooled off...
...Now Lonnie Mann didn't think that the little girl was dead...
...Not to say that there wasn't a lot during the trial...
...The attitude was: If they could do this to Leo Frank, what about the rest of us...
...The trial lasted 29 days, and each day during the trial, as they would bring the jury from the hotel down the street to the courthouse, the crowd outside the courthouse was ever increasing...
...He finally said that Mr...
...Leo Frank's papers were locked up at the temple here in Atlanta and nobody could have access to them...
...At age 82, I believe it was, or 84, he decided that before he died he wanted to set the record straight and clear his conscience...
...It was the number one show in Atlanta...
...He said they were just a bunch of rednecks in and out of the courthouse and he had to make his way through them...
...Lonnie Mann testified that he came to work that day...
...Jews are involved in every walk of life in this city, in its politics—just highly accepted...
...Postscript: On Wednesday, March 12, 1986, the Atlantic Constitution carried a banner headline on its front page: 70 YEARS LATER, LEO FRANK PARDONED...
...They did Shylock caricatures and caricatures of the Pope and just lots of slurs about how Jews control the newspapers and the railroads...
...People were climbing up in trees and sitting in the windows...
...His mother and stepfather told him, "Don't get involved...
...Copyright ®1988 by Howard Simons...
...Frank had very fine lawyers representing him...
...It was a well-to-do community by and large...
...He stayed up all night one night just a few weeks before his term as governor was about to end, and around dawn he woke up his wife and he said, "Look, this is the right thing to do, but it's going to mean my political death if I do it here in Georgia...
...So, to some extent, there was some good that came out of the pardon application...
...I think it does to some extent...
...It was the terminal point on the railroad...
...But by and large, the Jewish community in Atlanta is a very thriving community...
...None of that was true...
...For years after the lynching the community kept the lid on this story...
...I'm sure that by 1910 the railroad went on to Birmingham and New Orleans and places like that, but Atlanta was then, as it is today, primarily a transportation center...
...They used phrases like "dragging skeletons out of closets...
...Rabbi Marks refused to discuss it with anybody...
...After his sentence was commuted by the governor, this mob finally found him in Milledgeville...
...Atlanta had become a mill town...
...He says he opened the front door of the pencil factory—by now everybody had collected his or her pay and was supposed to have been gone...
...The story began: "Seventy years after he was lynched by an angry mob, Leo M. Frank was pardoned Tuesday for the murder of a teenage girl...
...Mary Phagan was found in the basement of the National Pencil Company factory on the day after Confederate Memorial Day...
...Each time a question was asked a witness, somebody in the window would repeat it to the crowd down below...
...They burned a cross on top of Stone Mountain after the Frank lynching and they renamed themselves something like the Reconstituted Knights of the Ku Klux Klan of Georgia...
...The company that Leo Frank managed was the National Pencil Company...
...people had guns in their back pockets...
...He turned around and ran though the door and jumped on a trolley car and went home...
...They formed their own country clubs, in effect, which became to some extent even more exclusive than their Gentile counterparts...
...he got elected president of the oldest B'nai B'rith lodge in Atlanta...
...There were no steps down from the main part of the building into the basement...
...And she made what has now become a famous saying...
...They had literally to pull her clothes off to see what color her skin was...
...He never got elected to anything again, I think, other than the bar association presidency in Atlanta...
...He got up and told his story and there were some elderly people there who had been around during those days who got up and thought this was just terrible—that we were resurrecting these old ghosts...
...Initially, they arrested Conley and then Conley implicated Frank and they arrested Leo Frank as well...
...ifli...
...Finally, after two or three questions, the judge excused Lonnie Mann as a witness because nobody could hear him and he was too young...
...But it really was a profiles-in-courage story...
...It set ofTa wave of anti-Semitism in the South, revitalization of the Ku Klux Klan, and all these horrible experiences flowed out of this case...
...and thousands and thousands of people were moving off these farms in Georgia and moving into the big cities like Atlanta...
...Thousands of people came to see it when they heard about the lynching...
...The press was horrified...
...Everybody just wanted to forget it and put it behind them...
...He ran out of the courthouse crying, never having had a chance to tell his story...
...Rumors just were running rampant throughout the city...
...There was a trial...
...The State Board of Pardons and Paroles pardoned Frank 'without attempting to address the question of guilt or innocence' according to a statement issued by the board...
...It all came out at the trial that none of that was true, but the jury just didn't seem * In 1982, an Atlanta court convicted Wayne B. Williams of two of a series of 28 murders of black children in Atlanta...
...No white man had been convicted of a capital offense in the South, up to that time, based solely on the testimony of a black witness—anywhere in the South, we're told...
...He was planning on running for the United States Senate, and everybody pretty well conceded that he would be a shoo-in for that position...
...I think Leo Frank is probably the only Jewish man who ever got lynched in this country...
...The judge could not control the audience or the crowd or anything...
...That was a legal charge in the courtrooms in the South...
...Her job was to put the little copper things that hold the erasers on the top of the pencils...
...I think that's a credit to the Jewish community and also to the Gentile community here...
...He says that he made up his mind that morning on the trolley that he was going to blurt out in court and tell what he had seen that day...
...In fact, the same 25 men or so who found Leo Frank in a rural Milledge-ville, Georgia, prison farm jail and brought him back to Atlanta in the middle of the night and then lynched him—that same group of people met several weeks later on top of Stone Mountain and burned a cross...
...They would be in their late 80s and 90s...
...I think we had a whole lot more support from the non-Jewish community than we expected we would have...
...She was never seen again...
...We brought him to Georgia...
...After he commuted Frank's sentence, they took Frank 75 miles from Atlanta to Milledge-ville to hide him out at a state prison farm, because they knew that the angry mobs would try to lynch him...
...not a whole lot, but some anyway...
...And that after he raped her, he strangled her to death, murdered her, and paid Conley the then enormous sum of S200 to dispose of the body down in the basement or the incinerator or something...
...he had prison garb on—pieces of lynch rope...
...There were a lot of factories here...
...Interestingly enough, if you read the judge's charge to the jury—in those days this was a legal charge in southern states, I later learned—he said, "Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, you have heard the testimony of Jim Conley, a nigger in this case...
...This was pre-air conditioning days, and the courthouse was on the second floor...
...He was a'frail little boy, and he was rather intimidated by these crowds, and when he couldn't find his mother he decided to go back to the pencil factory...
...The game plan, so to speak, was to commute Frank's sentence to life imprisonment, and when the heat was off and people cooled down in a few months, they were probably going to pardon him and let him out of jail altogether...
...But inside the elevator shaft, in the bottom of the shaft, they found a pile of what the police report described as human feces, in its undisturbed state...
...It's now called the Gate City Lodge of B'nai B'rith...
...At that point the little girl wasn't missing, so nobody was really too concerned...
...Howard Simons' new book, Jewish Times: Voices of the American Jewish Experience, contains interviews with 225 Jews from all over the United States...
...There was an episode in the television version of John Kennedy's Profiles in Courage, about what Governor Slaton did in this case, because it truly was a courageous act...
...These were some prominent business people from the Marietta, Georgia, area, which is a separate town but sort of a suburb of Atlanta...
...Lynchings of white people were...
...Finally, some prominent citizen came and got up on his car and urged everybody to stop doing this, that it wasn't a very nice thing to do, and they cut him down...
...He had, in fact, tried to borrow a lot of money from people there that day and nobody wanted to lend him money because he would never pay them back...
...A lot of professionals...
...He said that folks were kind of rowdy and drunk...
...He married a Selig girl, whose family was very prominent in Atlanta, and seemed to be doing well here until the incident occurred where this little girl was found murdered in his factory basement one weekend...
...let's not bring up this story again...
...That case sat at the pardon and parole board for over a year, and a day or two before Christmas, in 1983, the board decided they had not been convinced beyond any doubt whatsoever of Leo Frank's innocence, and therefore they refused to grant the pardon—a very unusual legal standard, "beyond any doubt whatsoever...
...He was related to the Montagus here in Atlanta,^ I believe...
...I think it's one of the best Jewish communities in the United States...
...We had a meeting at the Jewish Community Center when this first came to light...
...The newspapers made Frank out to be a philanderer, you know...
...Church groups rallied to our support, particularly after the pardon was denied...
...They had him everything from philandering young boys to raping young girls who worked in his factory...
...There was a lot of anti-Semitism floating around...
...His mother did what a lot of mothers would do...
...It just looked like she had fainted or something, he said...
...Now the governor of Georgia was considering commuting Leo Frank's sentence...
...But he said, "I can't let this man go to the gallows...
...Conley was a notorious drunk and a bully and an abuser of people...
...In later years, when Harry Golden was writing his book A Little Girl is Dead, which is an interesting account of the Frank case, his researchers were not granted access by the temple to these materials...
...Everybody just said, "Lonnie, let sleeping dogs lie...
...the land was worked out...
...They were really afraid...
...His family was prominent...
...Leo Frank came to Atlanta...
...He pulled her paycheck out...
...Don't get involved...
...There were a lot of sweatshops that employed young teenagers at ten-cents-an-hour wages, and a lot of them were owned by Jewish people, particularly Jews from up north—Boston, New York, Philadelphia, places like that...
...She came up to collect her paycheck...
...there wasn't any colored bathroom, I think, anywhere in the building...
...His name was Alonzo Mann, and he had been a 14-year-old boy working for Leo Frank at this factory...
...There never was any blood found up on the top floor of the factory, where the murder was supposed to have taken place, which is rather significant if she'd been bludgeoned up there as Conley said...
...I was asked to be the attorney for the group of organizations and I doubt whether I would have spent literally thousands of hours of my life working on that case if I had known that they were going to use that kind of impossible legal standard...
...The boll weevil had taken its toll...
...The Metropolitan Council of Churches issued statements, and organizations like that came to our rally...
...Frank was convicted by the jury and sentenced to hang...
...And when he got in there, Jim Conley was sitting at a table or something and gave him, as he put it, the evil eye and stared him down...
...Frank had put him on watch to make sure that nobody came in the building, and that Mr...
...Somebody had obviously gone to the bathroom at the bottom of that elevator...
...She told her husband that "I would rather be the widow of a brave and honorable man than the wife of a coward...
...That became very significant in the trial, because it was an old-fashioned elevator...
...But after a series of people, including the night watchman, were arrested for suspicion of the murder, they finally arrested a fellow named Jim Conley, who was a black porter—a sweeper, as he was called—in the factory...
...So there was this underlying, seething current going on that nobody really had identified at that point in time...
...The famous Louis Marshall handled Frank's appeal to the United States Supreme Court, and argued that in a mob-type atmosphere one could not get a fair trial in a state...
...It's a very complicated factual story, you know, as to what happened...
...Frank had always been nice to him and gave him pennies to go out and buy candies and sodas and things like that...
...He's buried in Mount Carmel Cemetery—I think it's Queens, not Brooklyn...
...At that point, Jewish organizations and Jewish people throughout the country got involved in raising money for an appeal...
...But it was too late to do Leo Frank any good...
...At the same time there had been a disaster out in the rural areas with regard to agriculture in the South...
...He had a foreboding sense about it all...
...We did a two-hour videotape of him under oath telling the pardon and parole board the story...
...Back then, as is still the case today, Jews did not belong to the exclusive country clubs...
...And he said, "We all know that niggers don't tell the truth unless they're forced to...
...Historians have told that when the Frank case came to trial in 1913, it occupied tremendous amounts of column inches of newspaper space...
...You have to remember it was a very assimilated community, and yet this blew them wide open...
...What happened was this...
...But the best way to get there was on the elevator...
...That's the Leo Frank trial...
...Dale M. Schwartz Does the shadow of Leo Frank still hang over the Jewish community here in Atlanta...
...It was such a horrible era in Jewish history in the South and in America...
...He didn't envision that she was dead...
...But Jews were accepted in society in Atlanta in most ways...
...I haven't been there to verify this myself, but they thought it was unusual to have a Latin inscription on a Jewish tombstone, not Yiddish, not Hebrew, not English...
...He had left because it was Confederate Memorial Day and his mother said she would meet him downtown to watch the parade with him...
...They called Frank "the rich Jew from Brooklyn," you know...
Vol. 14 • March 1989 • No. 2
