MARIETTA, Ga. — Down past the Big Chicken, the 56-foot-high, steel-beaked beacon of extra crispy that may be this town’s most prized landmark, the wedge of dirt hard by Interstate 75 is notable only for its lack of notability. Stopping here, Rabbi Steven Lebow leaves the engine running and car door open.
Nearly ever since the South Florida native came to this Atlanta suburb three decades ago, this spot — or, more specifically, the tale of murder and vengeance that has stained its ground and local history for 100 years — has weighed on him.
But with transportation crews readying to build over the place where Marietta’s leading citizens lynched a Jewish factory superintendent named Leo Frank a century ago, Lebow talks only of what’s worth preserving.
“There’s nothing to see here,” Lebow says. “That’s why we need to be the memory.”
As this community prepares to revisit that tale, though, there are reminders that it remains unsettled as well as unsettling.
In 1913, Frank was convicted of murdering 13-year-old Mary Phagan, who worked in his Atlanta factory. The case, charged with race, religion, sex and class, exploded in a national media frenzy. When Georgia’s governor commuted Frank’s death sentence, citizens took matters in their own hands.
The case established the Anti-Defamation League as the country’s most outspoken opponent of anti-Semitism. It also fueled the rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan.
Until ADL lawyers pressed officials to posthumously pardon Frank in the 1980s, the case was hushed in Atlanta’s synagogues, the homes of Old Marietta, and among Phagan’s descendants.
Though granted, the pardon was less than conclusive. Now, in a summer that has seen Southerners wrangle with the best-known symbol of the region’s embattled past, Lebow and others want to re-open a chapter some would prefer to let be.
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Soon after Dan Cox turned a Civil War-era hotel into the Marietta Museum of History, he knocked on the door of a 96-year-old resident, who regaled him with stories until Cox asked about Leo Frank.
“You could see the iron curtain fall,” Cox recalls. “I said, ‘Why won’t you tell me?’ But she said, ‘We were told not to talk about it,’ and they never did.”
Even so, actors and academics, reporters and playwrights have repeatedly delved into the story.
Frank, raised in New York, ran a factory in industrializing Atlanta. In 1913, Phagan, her hair in bows, stopped to collect her pay.
That night, a watchman found her bloodied body in the basement. Police arrested several men before settling on Frank, who proclaimed his innocence. His conviction rested on the testimony of a custodian, Jim Conley, a rare case of a black man’s word used against a white defendant.
Frank’s lawyers appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, arguing that a climate of anti-Semitism had resulted in an unfair trial. The court upheld the verdict, 7-2. In 1915, Gov. John Slaton commuted Frank’s sentence to life. A furious crowd hanged the politician in effigy.
Months later, a group of Marietta men took Frank from prison. On Aug. 17, they hanged him outside town. Nobody was ever charged.
“The Frank case was like a lightning strike,” said Steve Oney, who wrote “And the Dead Shall Rise,” a 2002 book on the case. “Everything in the South stood briefly in relief and then it was dark again.”
Substantial evidence points to Frank’s innocence, Oney said, but “there are imponderables that are always going to be imponderables.”
And so the century-old case stays alive.
The ADL is marking the anniversary with a push for Georgia to pass a hate-crime law. In nearby Kennesaw, the Southern Museum of Civil War and Locomotive History is opening a Frank exhibit. A musical about the case, “Parade,” is being re-staged in Atlanta. The Georgia Historical Society is bringing Oney to Marietta to talk about the case.
And on August 16, Lebow will lead a memorial service at which he and some current and former Georgia Supreme Court justices plan to call on state lawmakers to declare Frank’s exoneration.
“This is a story that won’t go away,” says Cox, 76. He leads the way through exhibits detailing Cobb County’s past — Cherokees banished on the Trail of Tears, Confederates and their Unionist neighbors. The only nod to the Frank case is a single placard and an old historical marker.
“I don’t want to minimize the event,” Cox says. “But it needs to be put away, like the flag, in its proper place.”