An Unspeakable Crime: The Prosecution and Persecution of Leo Frank. This item is unavailable.An Unspeakable Crime: The Prosecution and Persecution of Leo Frank

Was an innocent man wrongly accused of murder? On April 26, 1913, thirteen-year-old Mary Phagan planned to meet friends at a parade in Atlanta, Georgia. But first she stopped at the pencil factory where she worked to pick up her paycheck. Mary never left the building alive. A black watchman found Mary’s body brutally beaten and raped. Police arrested the watchman, but they weren’t satisfied that he was the killer. Then they paid a visit to Leo Frank, the factory’s superintendent, who was both a northerner and a Jew. Spurred on by the media frenzy and prejudices of the time, the detectives made Frank their prime suspect, one whose conviction would soothe the city’s anger over the death of a young white girl. The prosecution of Leo Frank was front-page news for two years, and Frank’s lynching is still one of the most controversial incidents of the twentieth century. It marks a turning point in the history of racial and religious hatred in America, leading directly to the founding of the Anti-Defamation League and to the rebirth of the modern Ku Klux Klan. Relying on primary source documents and painstaking research, award-winning novelist Elaine Alphin tells the true story of justice undone in America.

"By any measure the 1913 murder of teenage Mary Phagan was an ugly incident, just as by any measure the lunching of Leo Frank, a Jew, for the crime was equally horrific. Elaine Marie Alphin directs the story to a teen audience--teenagers being conspicuous players in the drama--and respectfully calls upon their rock-solid sense of justice to give them insight into this iconic piece of American jurisprudence gone wrong. Delving into archival material, numerous photographs included, Alphin thought she would be most moved by Frank's letters to his wife, but it was real time that brought her up short. 'I was shattered to see Mary Phagan's grave decorated with flowers and teddy bears, many of them recent although she had been murdered nearly a century earlier, ' she says. 'And I was chilled to see only two small plaques marking the site of Leo Frank's lynching, set too high for vandalism even after all this time.'"
--Kirkus Reviews

"On April 26, 1913, 13-year-old Mary Phagan left her Atlanta, GA, home to pick up her paycheck at the National Pencil Company and then attend the Confederate Memorial Day celebration. She never made it to the latter. Instead, her battered body was found in the basement of the factory along with two cryptic, semiliterate notes and some bloody handprints on a nearby door. The investigation was compromised from the get-go by a determination on the part of the police to bypass an obvious suspect and indict Frank, the company supervisor. The strictly chronological structure of this account of his arrest, indictment, conviction, and lynching is extremely helpful in understanding both the progression of the case through the court system and the impact of anti-Semitism and resentment toward Northerners in the post-Reconstruction South. The author's stance can hardly be termed objective, as her pro-Frank bias is clear. As presented, it seems obvious that he was innocent of the crime. The actual murderer confessed to his lawyer, who divulged the information in an autobiography published 46 years later, and an eyewitness confession in 1982 corroborated this. However, many people in Georgia still believe wholeheartedly that Frank was guilty. As the record stands, with his death sentence commuted in 1915 and official pardon issued in 1986, this recounting of an injustice is as haunting as the author contends. Well-placed period photos and reproductions add immediacy to the text, though the photographs of Frank's lynching are graphic and disturbing."
--School Library Journal