Leo Frank

Who was Leo Frank?

Leo Max Frank was a Jewish-American factory superintendent whose murder conviction and extrajudicial hanging in 1915 by a lynch mob planned and led by prominent citizens in Marietta, Georgia, drew attention to questions of antisemitism in the United States. He was posthumously pardoned in 1986 which the Georgia State Board of Pardons and Paroles stated was "in an effort to heal old wounds," without addressing the question of guilt or innocence.

An engineer and superintendent of the National Pencil Company in Atlanta, Frank was convicted on August 25, 1913, of the murder of one of his factory workers, 13-year-old Mary Phagan. She had been strangled on April 26 and was found dead in the factory cellar the next morning. Frank was the last person known to have seen her alive, and there were allegations that he had flirted with her before. His trial became the focus of powerful class, regional, and political interests. Raised in New York, he was cast as a representative of Yankee capitalism, a rich northern Jew lording it over vulnerable working women, as the historian Albert Lindemann put it. Former U.S. Representative Thomas E.