The Leo Frank Case: The Lynching of a Guilty Man, part 9

by Philip St. Raymond
for The American Mercury

JEWISH WRITERS on the Leo Frank case have made some astounding claims about the "atmosphere of anti-Semitism" during the trial of B'nai B'rith official Leo Frank for the strangulation sex murder of his 13-year-old employee, Mary Phagan, in 1913 Atlanta. There were, we are told, "anti-Semitic" mobs (yes, plural) on the streets, some right outside the open courtroom windows, openly threatening the judge and the jury, screaming "crack the Jew's neck!" and "hang the Jew or we'll hang you!" and the like.

It is even claimed that Jew-haters with rifles stood almost on the window sills during the trial, aiming at the trial participants just a few feet away. This doesn't comport well with the contemporary accounts of the trial from Atlanta's three daily newspapers of the time, the Constitution,  the Journal, and the Georgian — none of which reported any such outrages, despite the fact that they took a generally pro-Frank tone throughout the trial — despite the fact that all three employed Jewish editors — and despite the fact that Leo Frank and his defense team praised the newspaper coverage they received. All contemporary accounts show that the trial proceeded with dignity, fairness, proper procedure, and decent composure throughout. The judge wouldn't even tolerate applause when court was in session.

(ILLUSTRATION: click here for a large version, showing detail; This view and diagram of the courthouse and the crowd outside, published in the August 3, 1913 issue of the Atlanta Journal, gives the lie to the claims of pro-Frank writers. The crowd is described as patiently waiting for spectators to depart so they, too, could get a seat in the courtroom, and they are lined up at the court's entrance, nowhere near the windows. The caption reads: "Photo diagram of court room in old city hall building, where Leo M. Frank, superintendent of the National Pencil factory, is on trial for his life charged with the murder of Mary Phagan. Although the available seats are taken soon after court convenes, the crowd waits without all day for some weary spectator to give up a seat. On the second floor the many witnesses await their turn for a gruelling examination by attorneys on either side.")

In this, the ninth audio segment of this ground-breaking work originally published by the Nation of Islam, part of their series called The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews, we also learn that large Jewish advertisers — even the major shareholders in Leo Frank's place of business, the National Pencil Company, in whose factory the murder took place — were also satisfied with the trial coverage given by the Atlanta dailies, and maintained their significant spending on ad space before, during, and after the trial.

The two versions of the trial — the calm and serious one reported by every reporter who was there, and the one featuring near-rabid anti-Jewish mobs making violent threats — are very different. They are mutually contradictory. They can't both be true. Perhaps it is telling that, in very recent years, some Jewish writers (not including the ADL) have quietly dropped the lurid tales of "anti-Semitic" mobs from their version of events.

This new audio book, based on the Nation of Islam's The Leo Frank Case: The Lynching of a Guilty Man, the best investigative effort made on the Leo Frank case in the last 100 years, will take you on a trip into the past — to the greatest American murder mystery of all time; a mystery that will reveal to you the hidden forces that shape our world even today.

To read all the chapters we've published so far, simply click on this link.

We at The American Mercury are now proud to present part 9 of our audio version of this very important book, read by Vanessa Neubauer.

Simply press "play" on the player embedded above — or at the end of this article — to hear part 9 of the book.

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Click here to obtain a print or e-book copy of this important work, The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews, Vol. 3; The Leo Frank Case: The Lynching of a Guilty Man.

For further information on the Nation of Islam Historical Research Group, readers are encouraged to visit their Web site, noirg.org.