The Leo Frank memorial that stood near the site of the infamous lynching in Marietta 103 years ago this month has been relocated and on Thursday morning was rededicated.
Across the street from that venue on Roswell Road, representatives of the Cobb and metro Atlanta Jewish community and others gathered to honor the memory of Frank, regarded as the only Jewish lynching victim in American history.
Squeezed between the new Northwest Corridor Express Lanes on Interstate 75 and a taco eatery, the marker is located in a “parklet” created by the Georgia Department of Transportation.
The small slice of greenspace, with soft soil underneath reflecting its very recent planting, also has become the new focal point for continuing efforts to fully and formally clear Frank of the murder of 13-year-old Mary Phagan, a girl from Marietta, in 1913.
“Leo Frank is innocent,” said Rabbi Steven Lebow of Temple Kol Emeth in East Cobb, a leader in pushing for a full exoneration of Frank.
“Your presence here today is one more step toward full exoneration.”
The dignitaries included Marietta City Council member Joseph Goldstein and State Sen. Kay Kirkpatrick of East Cobb, as well as representatives of the Georgia Historical Society, the Cobb SCLC and various Jewish organizations.
Frank was a supervisor at the National Pencil Company in downtown Atlanta in 1913 when Phagan, a worker there, was found murdered in a basement. Frank was put on trial, convicted and sentenced to death and later imprisoned in Milledgeville.
When his sentence was commuted to life, a mob from Marietta traveled to the jail. The mob, which allegedly included prominent local citizens, law enforcement and elected officials, kidnapped Frank. They brought him back to Marietta and on Aug. 17, 1915, hanged him from an oak tree near what is now Frey’s Gin Road.
The trial and lynching earned national headlines, inflaming anti-Semitic tensions in America and helping revive the Ku Klux Klan, but also giving birth to the Anti-Defamation League.
In more recent years, the Frank case has inspired several films and books as Jewish leaders worked for a pardon. That effort was sparked by a 1982 admission by Alonzo Mann, a pencil factory worker, that Frank was wrongly convicted.
After a silence of nearly 70 years, Mann said he saw Jim Conley, a factory custodian, carrying Mary Phagan’s body the day she died. Mann also said was told by Conley he would be killed if he told anyone about what he saw.
At Frank’s trial, Conley was the main witness for the prosecution against Frank. The state of Georgia granted Frank a pardon in 1986, but only on the grounds that he did not receive a fair trial.
“We’re still trying to get a new trial that would, in effect, exonerate him,” said Dale Schwartz, an Atlanta attorney who also has led the charge for a pardon.
He retold the story of the pardon effort in detail, as well as his own Jewish family being attacked by the Klan for hiring black workers at a clothing store in Winder during the Jim Crow era.
The Leo Frank memorial was originally dedicated in 2008 by the Georgia Historical Society, the Jewish American Society for Historic Preservation and Temple Kol Emeth.
It had to be moved four years ago to make way for an entrance ramp to the Express Lanes, which are scheduled to open by the end of the summer. The marker was kept in storage during that time by Georgia DOT.
Jerry Klinger, founder and president of the Jewish American Society, said the new site is the perfect venue for what he said is “an important story.”
“We have an opportunity to transform the meaning of this location beyond Leo Frank,” he said.
Klinger noted nearly a century’s worth of anti-lynching legislation that has never been passed, as well as a bipartisan bill recently introduced in the U.S. Senate.
He said his organization will soon locate a black granite anti-lynching marker on the site, also in honor of Frank, and has placed a floral arrangement near Phagan’s gravesite at the Marietta City Cemetery.
“We chose to remember the first victim but also chose to remember all the victims in the United States who have suffered the horrors of lynching,” Klinger said.
The Southeast regional office of the Anti-Defamation League in Atlanta also planted a crepe myrtle tree and invited guests to shovel dirt around it to honor the dead.
Shelley Rose, the ADL deputy regional director, said Georgia is only one of five states that does not have a hate-crimes law, and said it’s important to press for such legislation here.
Rabbi Daniel Dorsch of Congregation Etz Chaim in East Cobb offered a benediction he dubbed “A Really Horrible Thing,” based on what a supermarket clerk told him in reference to the Frank case, not long after he moved to the community two years ago.
The rededication, Dorsch said, can help “to inspire us to go out and create a world where there will be no more horrible things.”
The new Leo Frank memorial site is located between Huarache Veloz Mexican Taqueria, 1157 Roswell Road, and Interstate 75.
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