Leo Frank Lynched by Antisemitic Mob After Governor Commutes Sentence: Only Jewish Lynching in U.S. History

Thirty-one-year-old Leo Frank, a Jewish factory superintendent, was kidnapped from prison in Milledgeville, Georgia, and lynched by an antisemitic mob calling themselves “The Knights of Mary Phagan”—the only Jewish lynching in U.S. history. In spring 1913, thirteen-year-old Mary Phagan, a factory worker, was found murdered in the basement of the National Pencil Factory in Atlanta where Frank served as superintendent. Frank, a Northerner raised and educated in New York, was swiftly convicted and sentenced to death in a trial tinged with anti-Jewish and anti-Northern fervor, often stirred up in Southern newspapers. When Georgia’s governor commuted Frank’s sentence to life imprisonment in 1915, recognizing the trial’s irregularities, an outraged mob stormed the state penitentiary. Armed mobs roamed Atlanta streets, forcing Jewish businessmen to board up windows and doors as antisemitism reached a fever pitch. The Knights of Mary Phagan kidnapped Frank, transported him to Phagan’s hometown of Marietta, and lynched him.

The lynching occurred despite serious doubts about Frank’s guilt. Evidence pointed to Jim Conley, a janitor in the factory who falsely accused Frank during the trial. Decades later, in 1986, Frank was granted a posthumous pardon based on the State’s failure to ensure his safety, though the pardon did not officially clear him of murder. Historians widely agree Frank was wrongly convicted, a victim of antisemitic prejudice, regional hostility toward Northerners, and a corrupted justice system that bowed to mob sentiment. The trial and lynching fueled support for the recently founded Anti-Defamation League, which took up Frank’s case as evidence of the dangerous antisemitism threatening Jewish Americans. Newspaper coverage of the Frank case came to a crashing halt after the lynching, as establishment media proved complicit in minimizing the significance of anti-Jewish violence.

The Leo Frank incident led directly to the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan. Three months after Frank’s lynching, many of the men who participated in his murder joined William J. Simmons at Stone Mountain outside Atlanta on November 25, 1915, for a cross burning that marked the KKK’s rebirth. The revived Klan made antisemitism a main tenet alongside its anti-Black racism, expanding to include Catholics and immigrants as targets. By the mid-1920s, the KKK claimed four million members—more than all the Jews in the United States—demonstrating how a single act of antisemitic violence could catalyze a mass white supremacist movement. The Frank lynching revealed the vulnerability of minority communities when justice systems are captured by majoritarian prejudice, when media outlets amplify rather than challenge bigotry, and when state authorities fail to protect prisoners from mob violence. The case established a pattern where miscarriages of justice targeting marginalized groups would inspire rather than shame extremist movements, with lynchings serving as recruiting tools and public demonstrations of white supremacist power rather than anomalies to be condemned and prevented.