The Lynching of Leo Frank

In 1914, Leo Frank, a manager at the National Pencil Company in Atlanta, was convicted of the rape and murder of Mary Phagan, a 13-year-old factory employee. There was great confusion in the case, with Frank and James Conley, the plant’s night watchman, emerging as the chief suspects. The fact that Frank was northern and Jewish, and Conley was African American, added race, sectionalism, and religion to the potent brew of sensationalism and prejudice that swirled about the trial. Frank was convicted and sentenced to death, but Georgia’s governor commuted the sentence to life in prison. Two months later, a mob abducted Frank from prison and lynched him. Frank was later cleared of the crime and given a posthumous pardon. This postcard of the lynching is a rare document of this horrific event, all the more disturbing because the photograph includes a second photographer among the spectators. Lynchings were public spectacles, and photographic postcards an important means of spreading the terror sown by the murders.