Tuesday, 29th April 1913 Nude Dancers Pictures Upon Factory Walls

Atlanta Georgian

Tuesday, April 29th, 1913

Suggestive Illustrations Clipped From Magazines Pasted Up About Scene of Tragedy.

Pictures of Salome dancers in scanty raiment, and of chorus girls in different postures adorned the walls of the National Pencil Company's plant. They had been clipped from a theatrical and prize-fighting magazine.

A more melodramatic stage setting for a rendezvous or for the committing of a murder could hardly have been obtained. The building is cut up with partitions, which allow of a person passing about from one part to another without attracting the attention of others. While the main entrance is used in gaining entrance to the building, the first floor is vacant, this space having formerly been leased out by the National Pencil Company. A person could enter the building, descend the ladder to the cellar and not attract the attention of those above. One could likewise move from one floor to the other without being noticed.

Stygian blackness greets those who enter the cellar. Two gas jets afford a flickering, sickly light, which seems only to add to the pitchy darkness.

Temptations Many.

That temptations probably were laid across the path of the girls who worked in the plant was not denied by Superintendent Leo Frank. Instead he admitted that it was highly probable.

"In a plant of this size, where 170 people are employed, and among them a large number of girls, it is quite probable that some of them were approached by some of the men working in the shop," said Mr. Frank. "A force of this kind is continually shifting, and undoubtedly many low characters have worked there. It has been our effort to eliminate them as much as possible and the foreman have been strict in this regard.

"Under the present conditions of morale in Atlanta, with the segregated district abolished, these low characters undoubtedly have grown worse. That our janitor was bribed to allow them in the building, while a surprise to me, is not an unbelievable suggestion. Such fellows as these might be expected to stoop to such things."

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