leo frank

Murder case, Leo Frank lynching live on

Atlanta, Georgia — Turn back time, more than 90 years, to a cold case that won’t gather dust. It’s a classic whodunit, starting with the rape and murder of a 13-year-old girl and ending in a lynching. It was grist for a prosecutor’s political aspirations, a case that was appealed all the way to the country’s highest court and a story hotly debated in the national press.

At the center of it all was Leo Frank, a northern Jew who’d moved to Atlanta to supervise the National Pencil Company factory. When the body of Mary Phagan, a white child laborer, was found in the basement, law enforcement homed in on Frank. He was tried and convicted, based on what most historians say was the perjured testimony of a black man, and sentenced to death.

But when the governor commuted his sentence in 1915, about 25 men abducted Frank, 31, from the state prison and hung him from a tree in Marietta, Georgia.

Considered one of the most sensational trials of the early 20th century, the Frank case seemed to press every hot-button issue of the time: North vs. South, black vs. white, Jew vs. Christian, industrial vs. agrarian.

In the years since, it has inspired numerous books and films, TV programs, plays, musicals and songs. It has fueled legal discussions, spawned a traveling exhibition and driven public forums.

Who murdered Mary Phagan? What forces were behind the lynching of Frank? Why should we still care?

Answers to these questions, or theories, keep coming.

"Leo Frank was not a good ole Southern boy. He was different and not ashamed of being different," said Ben Loeterman, whose new documentary, "The People v. Leo Frank," will air Monday on PBS. "The test of us as a society is not necessarily how we treat the best among us but how we treat the most questionable." Mixed in with ongoing analysis of the Phagan-Frank story are the descendants of those involved, people who learned of their connections differently and carry these legacies forward in unique ways.

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