The SPLC’s Deceitful Portrayal of the Leo Frank Case

By Mark Weber

Institute for Historical Review
April 12, 2025

 

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) – an influential organization known for “fighting racism” – recently issued a strangely deceitful and evasive statement, “Black. Jewish. Divided by Hate. Stronger Together” about the Leo Frank murder case, an important episode of American history that has been in the news in recent weeks.

Mary Phagan, a 13-year-old White employee at a pencil factory in Atlanta was brutally murdered in April 1913. Police investigators first suspected Newt Lee, a Black employee at the factory who discovered the body, but soon concluded that Leo Frank, the factory manager, had committed the crime. During the trial, which generated intense press attention, both locally and nationally, Frank’s lawyers appealed to and tried to inflame anti-Black sentiment among the twelve White men of the jury in an effort to pin the murder on Jim Conley, a Black man who also worked at the factory. Frank’s attorneys told the court that Conley was “a beastly, drunken, filthy, lying nigger,” “a cannibal, a man-eater,” a “stinking black brute,” and much more in that spirit

Remarkably, the White jurors set aside the anti-Black attitudes that prevailed at the time, and instead concluded that the plain evidence, including the testimony of Black witnesses, was more credible and convincing than the testimony of Frank or the arguments made by his legal team. Frank was the first White man in the “Jim Crow” South to be convicted of a capital crime in a trial that prominently featured the testimony of Black witnesses.

Frank was convicted and sentenced to death. But shortly before his execution, the Georgia state Governor commuted the sentence to life imprisonment. Eight weeks later, a group of enraged citizens took Frank from prison, drove him to the murdered girl’s home town, and hanged him from a tree.

For more than century, the Anti-Defamation League and other Jewish organizations have promoted the view that Leo Frank – a prominent member of the Atlanta Jewish community – was unjustly accused and convicted. This view, which has been supported by Hollywood and the mainstream media, is widely accepted.

The two authors of the SPLC statement contend that both Frank and Conley were “scapegoat” victims of a “racist system” of “white supremacy.” The SPLC writers make no mention of Mary Phagan, the actual murder victim. If both Frank and Conley were innocent, as the SPLC suggests, readers might wonder just what the trial was all about. The authors of this SPLC polemic don’t even try to explain.

Probably the most detailed and illuminating study of this subject and its enduring importance is The Leo Frank Case: The Lynching of a Guilty Man, an impressively researched analysis published by the Nation of Islam. The California-based Institute for Historical Review recently mailed a copy of this book to each member of the Georgia state legislature. This 536-page work – available from the IHR – is illustrated with photographs, diagrams, and maps, and is referenced with more than a thousand footnotes.