The lynching of a northern Jew Leo Frank over rape and murder charges of a 13-year-old girl Mary Phagan took place some 90 years back. However, the execution of Leo Frank will be long remembered as a White v/s Black or Jew v/s Christian or North v/s South issue for ever.

In a Georgian town Marietta, a bunch of 25 people hung a man from an oak tree in the presence of countless others who just stood by and rather praised the action. The person hung in the incident was 31-year-old northern Jew named Leo Frank, a National Pencil Company factory supervisor in Atlanta. Frank was forcibly released rather abducted by the gang from the state prison police custody and the act they performed was considered as the ‘justice’ by the killers and the whole community.

Upon discovery of 13-year-old Mary Phagan from the basement of the NPC factory, Leo Frank was arrested, tried and convicted and finally sentenced to death. Mary was a white child and a laborer in the same factory while the subsequent circumstances clearly suggested the element of prejudice was involved in the black man’s testimony against the white one.

Frank’s lawyers approached the then governor John M. Slaton and succeeded to get his death sentence commuted into life imprisonment in 1915, right after two years of Leo’s arrest. What followed next was the tragic murder of a prisoner at the hands of aggressive crowd. The trial and the death of Leo will be considered the early 20th century’s most astounding event for ever as it aroused the emotions among the two nations; black versus white.

Neither people have forgotten the issue nor will they ever. A plentiful of television programs, dramas, songs and movies, documentaries alongside a lot of books have tried to cover the hot topic of ‘justice’ or ‘injustice’ out of the event involving the lynching of a white man by a black community. The historians are of the opinion that an incident that occurred on American soil was the zenith of a conspiracy on a state level.

Leo Frank