His trial, conviction, and appeals attracted national attention. His lynching two years later, in response to the remission of his death sentence, became the focus of social, regional, political and racial concerns, particularly regarding anti-Semitism.

Frank (1884-1915) was born in Texas to a Jewish home of German descent. He lived for a time in New York and graduated with a degree in mechanical engineering from Cornell University. He worked in various companies, until in 1907 he was hired to run the National Pencil Company pencil factory in Atlanta. In 1910 he married Lucille Selig, a young woman from a prominent industrial family, and became actively involved in the city's Jewish community, being elected president of the local B'nai B'rith.

Court case and lynching

He was convicted on circumstantial evidence of the rape and murder of an employee: thirteen-year-old girl Mary Phagan. The trial was followed by the sensational press. Frank's extrajudicial murder is the first known anti-Semitic lynching in the United States. Georgian politician Tom Watson capitalized on the case to bolster public support for the renewal of the Ku Klux Klan, which had been dismantled by the federal government more than 40 years ago.

The jury unanimously found him guilty, and he was sentenced to death. The sentence was commuted to life in prison after Georgia Governor John Slaton reviewed the evidence. On the night of August 17, 1915, a group of men calling themselves the Knights of Mary Phagan arrived at the Milledgeville State Penitentiary, kidnapped Frank, and led him in handcuffs to a farm in nearby Marietta, where he was hanged. His last words were: I think more about my wife and my mother than about my own life.

Mary Phagan's Knights included former Georgia Governor Joseph Mackey Brown, Judge Newton Morris, and former Marietta Mayor Eugene Herbert Clay; Also present were the famous lawyer John Tucker Dorsey, the city's sheriff William Frey, lawyers and even doctors.

In 1982, Alonzo Mann, a former employee of the factory, declared that he was convinced that Leo Frank was innocent. He claimed that he saw Jim Conley, an African-American janitor, take Mary Phagan to the basement, but that he threatened to kill her if she spoke about her.

In 1986 Leo Frank was posthumously pardoned because of Alonzo Mann's testimony, although he was never officially acquitted of the murder charge.

The story of his trial, his conviction, his lynching and the subsequent events was told in the miniseriesThe murder of Mary Phagan(1988)

Source: Wikipedia

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Leo Frank, murdered by the Knights of Mary Phagan - Aurora Israel