On a sultry summer morning in Marietta, Georgia dozens of people gathered around the base of an oak tree to gawk at the man swinging from a noose. Leo Frank was a manager for the National Pencil Company of Atlanta, Georgia in 1913 when he was falsely accused of killing a 14-year-old employee, Mary Phagan. The murder was the catalyst for one of the most virulent anti-Semitic episodes in American history.
Frank’s trial was a spectacle. A menacing crowd outside the courtroom's open windows could clearly be heard chanting "kill the Jew.” Even though all the evidence pointed to pencil company janitor Jim Conley being the murderer, Leo Frank was declared guilty and condemned to death.
Realizing that an innocent man had been sentenced to die the Governor of Georgia commuted the sentence to life imprisonment. Frank would lose his freedom, but at least he would be alive to fight the unjust conviction.
A few weeks later on August 17, 1915 an anti-Semitic mob took matters into their own hands. They abducted Leo Frank from his jail cell and hung him from the oak tree.
In direct response to the climate of anti-Semitism that gave rise to the murder, the ADL was established to fight bigotry and ensure that such a thing would never happen again. Frank remains the only Jewish person ever to be lynched in the United States.
We never forgot Leo Frank. For nearly 100 years ADL has continued to fight tirelessly against anti-Semitism to ensure that he, and all the others who have lost their lives to hate, did not die in vain.
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