THE DEATH OF LEO FRANK They may take human life and attempt to annihilate human honor," Leo Frank '06 wrote while sitting in a prison cell in Atlanta, awaiting execution for a murder he did not commit, "but I am confident that the truth can not be strangled to death." Frank wrote those words nearly eighty-five years ago, before his own murder made him the nation's most famous Jewish martyr. Now, director Harold Prince has brought his life story to Manhattan's Lincoln Center as a musical, Parade. Frank was accused of the brutal killing of a teenage girl in the summer of 1913. At the time, he was a young mechanical engineer, raised in Brooklyn and recently graduated from Cornell, who had taken a job managing his uncle's pencil factory in Atlanta. His background made him a scapegoat to wounded Confederate pride and the focus of a raging intolerance that bridled against his northern accent, mocked his education, and disparaged his alien religion. The facts against him were few. Mary Phagan, a white, thirteen-year-old employee, had gone to the factory to pick up her pay on a hot Saturday afternoon. It was Confederate Memorial Day. Frank, the last person to admit seeing her alive, handed her a check shortly after noon. Her body was found the following morning in the factory basement--tortured, raped, and strangled. Frank was arrested two days later. The four-month trial was held in a small courthouse packed with spectators and surrounded by a mob. The main witness was Jim Conley, a black sweeper employed at the factory, who testified that he had seen Frank struggling with the girl. Several employees also suggested that Frank had "indulged with familiarities" with women at the factory. Although Cornell professors and former classmates appeared at the trial as character witnesses, they accomplished little. Ten thousand angry mourners had viewed Mary Phagan's corpse. Local Atlanta papers vied with each other for readers by running sensational, often inaccurate stories that inflamed the populace. Tom Watson, publisher of Watson's Jeffersonian Magazine, demanded the death of "the filthy, perverted Jew of New York," and called for the boycott of all Jewish stores and businesses in Georgia. During the trial, crowds outside the courthouse chanted "Hang the Jew, or we'll hang you," and the judge warned Frank's attorney that there was "danger of violence" if he was acquitted, and requested that Frank be absent when the verdict was read. Frank was found guilty and sentenced to hang. The appeals lasted more than a year. "The question to be decided," Frank wrote to Adolph Ochs, the publisher of the New York Times, on November 20, 1914, "is whether an unruly mob operating in an atmosphere of smoldering violence and prejudice, may . . . invade our courts and compel verdicts." Oliver Wendell Holmes, vigorously dissenting from the Supreme Court's decision not to review the case, wrote: "Mob law does not become due process of law by securing the assent of a terrorized jury." Frank lost every appeal, but his case became a national sensation. Mass meetings were held in Boston, Chicago, Minneapolis, and New York, and clemency petitions containing more than a million signatures were sent to Georgia Governor John Slaton. A hundred thousand personal letters also arrived, including messages from ten governors, eight senators, scores of congressmen, and the presidents of Cornell, Yale, and the University of Chicago. There were also a thousand death threats if Slaton allowed Frank to live. Still, the night before Frank was scheduled to die, the governor acted. He had reviewed the case, as well as some new evidence, and concluded Frank was innocent. "Two thousand years ago another governor washed his hands of a case and turned over a Jew to a mob," Slaton later said. "That governor's name has been accursed for two thousand years. If today another Jew were lying in his grave because I had failed to do my duty . . . I would consider myself an assassin through cowardice." Frank's death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment and he was transferred to a rural prison camp. Three weeks later his throat was slashed by a fellow prisoner with a butcher knife, but he survived. A month later, on August 25, 1915, a mob calling itself the Knights of Mary Phagan stormed the prison just before midnight. They overpowered the guards, kidnapped Frank, drove him to Marietta, Georgia, and lynched him. Photos of his body, hanging from an oak tree, were taken and sold for many years as postcards in local stores. Unfortunately, the new musical version of Frank's life and death seems destined to displease anyone familiar with actual events. The production, which opened in mid-December, focuses on the romance between Frank and his wife, concocting a fictional crusade in which she tries to convince Slaton to review the case. (Frank is played by Brent Carver, who won a Tony for Kiss of the Spider Woman.) The show begins and ends with a parade celebrating Confederate Memorial Day, complete with a one-legged, gray-coated veteran astride a white horse, and an old oak tree looms ominously over the stage during many of the catchy, carnival-inspired song and dance routines. Prince seems to be suggesting that the trial of Leo Frank was a community spectacle where the best and the worst elements of Southern society were on vivid display. The musical overlooks one historical note. Several months after Frank's lynching, the Knights of Mary Phagan met again on a mountaintop near Atlanta and created the modern-day Ku Klux Klan. It also fails to mention another vital fact: seventy years after Frank's murder, an eye-witness to the crime came forward and identified Jim Conley, the man whose testimony had convicted Frank, as the actual killer of Mary Phagan. Frank's confidence in the irrepressible nature of truth was finally redeemed three years later, on March 11, 1986, when he was officially pardoned by the state of Georgia. -- Micah Fink '90