The SPLC’s Deceitful Portrayal of the Leo Frank Case

And their non-portrayal of the murder of Mary Phagan

by Mark Weber

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 [and also the president of Atlanta’s B’nai B’rith], 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.

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Note from NV Editor:

How disgusting of the SPLC to publish such dishonorable drivel in the days immediately leading up to today: the 112th anniversary of Mary Phagan’s murder.

Not only did Frank’s team try to convince authorities that the Black night watchman Newt Lee was guilty, they also planted a fake bloody shirt at his home, and then insinuated to police that they should search there. The shirt was analyzed and discovered to have been dipped in blood while unworn — an obvious fake. Then, several weeks later, an equally fake “bloody club” was “discovered” at the exact location where Black sweeper Jim Conley had been keeping watch for Frank on the day of the murder — discovered by a Pinkerton man named McWorth who was in the pay of Frank, despite the fact that police and other detectives had thoroughly searched that very spot weeks before and found nothing. These are hardly the acts of an innocent man!

Mary Phagan-Kean, the great niece of Frank’s victim Mary Phagan, will be releasing a new edition of her excellent book, The Murder of Little Mary Phagan in the next few months. It’s important to get the truth of this case before the public, because the Jewish power structure, and especially the ADL, are sure to be pushing their pro-Frank narrative this summer, as we approach the 110th anniversary of Leo Frank’s hanging for his unspeakable crime.

As Kevin Alfred Strom has pointed out here on National Vanguard, the Jews’ main claims — that sweeper Jim Conley was the real murderer and that Leo Frank couldn’t be guilty — don’t hold water on many levels, and two of those levels are so obvious that they can be understood after a single moment’s reflection.

He said: “Besides the victim, there were only five people in the building. And four of them obviously didn’t do it. That leaves Leo Frank.”

The five were: 1) Harry Denham and 2) Arthur White, machinists working up on the fourth floor, and 3) Mrs. White, who was with her husband on the fourth floor and had just brought him lunch; 4) Jim Conley, keeping watch for Frank near the building entrance; and 5) Leo Frank in his office on the second floor about 30 feet away from Conley.

As to why Conley was obviously innocent, Mr. Strom stated, “They are still trying to convince people that Conley did it. Conley had just been paid more than five times what Mary Phagan had in her purse. They want us to believe he killed her for $1.20. Sure he did. And Conley would have had to kill her right next to the unlocked front door, in the highest-traffic part of the building, where anyone could walk in at any time, and where several people had walked by in just the last few minutes — and all within 30 feet of his boss. And all this in 1913 Atlanta. Wow, what a plausible story.”

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Source: Institute for Historical Review and Mary Phagan-Kean; pictures/captions by National Vanguard editorial team