Two Murders Eighty Years Apart (1)

On April 26, 1913, a young white girl was murdered in Atlanta. On April 22, 1993, a black teenager was murdered in South London. Both cases are still in the news for all the wrong reasons.

Forget everything you may have heard about either or both these cases; there was no racial motive in the prosecution of Leo Frank and there was no racial motive in the murder of Stephen Lawrence. Let’s deal with the earlier case first.

Mary Phagan was 13 years old and worked long hours in the pencil factory which was owned by the National Pencil Company. This was nothing unusual for the time. April 26, 1913 was a Saturday; Mary wasn’t working that day but went to the factory to collect her meagre wages, and didn’t leave. In the small hours of Sunday morning, her body was found in the basement by the nightwatchman Newt Lee. She had been raped and strangled. 

Because he had found the body, Lee was an obvious suspect, and would have ended up being hanged if the real murderer’s attempt to frame him had succeeded. There were in fact a number of good suspects but eventually only two were deemed credible: Leo Frank and Jim Conley. Frank was the manager and part-owner of the company. Conley was an odd job man and Frank’s gofer; like Lee he was a Negro while Frank was a Jew. 

To call this case bizarre is an understatement because of two notes found by the body purportedly written by the victim and indicating that Lee had attacked her sexually. These notes were written by Conley, who owned up to them and told a bizarre tale about how he had written them at the insistence of his boss. Who would believe such a story? As ever, the truth is stranger than fiction if not as popular. The police conducted a thorough investigation and concluded that Conley was indeed telling the truth. Mary appears to have been murdered upstairs; there was physical evidence to that effect. Frank appears to have come on to Mary then raped her when she rejected him. In August 1915, the populist politician Tom Watson published a lengthy article in his magazine in which he analysed the case in depth. This analysis and all the incriminating evidence against Frank have been ignored by scholars down through the decades.

Leo Frank stood trial for the murder of Mary Phagan, and was convicted. Jim Conley was the principal prosecution witness, but far from the only one. This was said to be the first time in the Deep South that a white man had been convicted of murder on the evidence of a black one. One might have imagined this would have pleased the race hustlers of the day, but instead they created an entirely different narrative, namely, Frank was the victim of anti-Semitism. This was absurd, at that time most blacks were at best second class citizens. and Conley would have been lower down the food chain than that. He wasn’t even allowed to use the same rest room as Frank.

All the racial bigotry in this case flowed in the opposite direction; Frank’s supporters claimed Conley must have been coached because no black man could have come up with such a convoluted story. An alternative explanation is that Conley was telling the truth. Frank’s lawyer portrayed Conley as barely human. Then there was the little matter of the bloody shirt that was planted in Newt Lee’s dwelling. Who could have done that but the real murderer, the man who also doctored Lee’s time slip?

At the end of the trial, Frank was convicted and sentenced to death. Conley was sentenced to a year on a chain gang as an accomplice after the event. Although Frank’s guilt was clear, his supporters never gave up, and indeed they still haven’t. A play based on and sympathetic to Frank is currently running on Broadway; Parade was first produced in 1998 and has been very successful.

What happened to Leo Frank? His death sentence was commuted, something that angered the local whites, and in August 1915, a group of them kidnapped him from his prison, drove him to Marietta and strung him up from a tree. 

The conviction of Leo Frank led to the founding of the misnamed Anti-Defamation League. Unremitting pressure by the ADL led to Frank being pardoned in 1986, but his conviction has never been overturned. What of Jim Conley? He is believed to have died around 1962; it is significant that although he fell foul of the law again, no white woman, indeed no woman of any race, claimed he had laid hands on her, and no one ever sought to avenge Mary Phagan by attacking him, which means either that white southerners are not as bigoted as they are sometimes made out to be, or they truly believed Conley to have been innocent. 

As for the American Jewish establishment, they have never forgiven the Deep South for taking the word of a low class black man over a member of their elite.

To Part 2.