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LEO FRANK CENTENNIAL
Frank Event Launches ADL Drive on Hate Crimes
By Michael Jacobs
[email protected]
T
he 100th anniversary of the
lynching of Leo Frank provided
an opportunity to reflect on how
far Georgia has come, how far the state
and the nation have to go, how much
civil rights leader Julian Bond will be
missed, and how much new or improved hate-crimes legislation is needed across the nation.
The new national director of the
Anti-Defamation League, Jonathan
Greenblatt, made one of his first public
appearances at the Frank commemoration held by the ADL’s Buckhead-based
Southeast Region at the Georgian Club
in southeastern Cobb County on Monday, Aug. 17.
Greenblatt, whose organization
first came to prominence in response
to Frank’s 1913 conviction in the murder of Mary Phagan and his 1915 lynching, used the ceremony to launch the
ADL’s 50 States Against Hate initiative.
The project aims to pass hatecrimes laws in the five states that lack
them — Georgia, South Carolina, Arkansas, Indiana and Wyoming — and
to strengthen in the other 45 laws to
ensure they include sexual orientation,
gender, gender identity and disability.
Georgia partners in the initiative include the American Jewish Committee,
the National Council of Jewish Women,
the NAACP and SOJOURN: Southern
Jewish Resource Network for Gender
and Sexual Diversity.
Both Greenblatt’s speech to a room
packed with community leaders and a
few national leaders — including former ADL Southeast Regional Director Deborah Lauter, now the agency’s
national civil rights director — and
the ADL’s pamphlet on the initiative
cited the nine killings at a Charleston
church June 17.
The confessed white-supremacist
killer, Dylann Roof, won’t be charged
with a hate crime because South Carolina doesn’t have such a law, although
he could face the death penalty.
“I believe that without this law,
without this charge, the state prosecution is simply incomplete. We cannot
properly recognize the clear bias motivation behind these murders,” Greenblatt said. “We owe it to the victims, the
Charleston Nine, to be able to call this
crime what it was and to be able to pursue justice on those specific grounds.”
His audience included Roy Barnes,
who was governor when Georgia
passed a hate-crimes law in 2000 that
was later overturned, and Georgia Attorney General Sam Olens, who would
have to defend a Georgia hate-crimes
law against any court challenges.
Barnes and Olens were among the
speakers before Greenblatt. Barnes,
whose wife is a descendant of one of
the Frank lynchers, and fellow lawyer
Dale Schwartz, who was the ADL’s lead
counsel in the push for a Frank pardon
in the mid-1980s, shared a rollicking
panel moderated by WSB-TV personality Jocelyn Dorsey.
Barnes and Schwartz both offered
a look behind the scenes at the ultimately successful fight to win a pardon for Frank in 1986, and both backed
the pursuit of exoneration for Frank
through a route that doesn’t again involve the Board of Pardons and Paroles.
Olens focused on how dramatically Cobb County has changed in a century to feature a more diverse judiciary
and perhaps a friendlier home for Jews
than some of the nearby counties.
But Greenblatt turned to the most
prominent member of the audience
and the man who followed him on the
program, Congressman John Lewis,
when he focused on the sad news from
the weekend: the unexpected death of
former NAACP leader and Georgia legislator Julian Bond at the age of 75.
Greenblatt said it was impossible
not to take a moment to remember
Bond because “all of us are part of his
legacy.”
Lewis said the ADL event late
Monday morning was the first time he
could move out of his house since hearing the news about Bond.
“We lost a fighter for jus ѥ