LEO FRANK CENTENNIAL
Exoneration Sought in ‘Newer South’
By David R. Cohen
[email protected]
M
AUGUST 21 ▪ 2015
ore than 350 people gathered
at Temple Kol Emeth on Sunday, Aug. 16, 100 years after
Leo Frank was abducted from the state
prison in Milledgeville to be driven
through the night and lynched in the
morning by some of Marietta’s most
prominent citizens.
“We don’t live in that older South
anymore,” Kol Emeth Rabbi Stephen
Lebow said at a memorial for Frank.
“In the newer South, we are here
to ask the state of Georgia to clear the
name of an innocent man,” he said. “Let
the state of Georgia finally acknowledge that Leo Frank was innocent.
That’s all we ask for. Nothing more is
necessary. But nothing less will do.”
Lebow was joined by such speakers as Cobb County Superior Court
Chief Judge Stephen Schuster, Georgia Senior Assistant Attorney General
Van Pearlberg, former state Supreme
Court Justices Leah Sears and Norman
Fletcher, and lawyer Dale Schwartz,
who served as lead counsel in obtain-
AJT
14
A petition to the Cobb
ing a posthumous pardon
County
commissioners
for Frank in 1986.
to exonerate Frank was
Each speaker rememstarted by Rabbi Lebow and
bered Frank and pieced tohad collected 244 of the regether a compelling arguquired 500 signatures by
ment for his exoneration.
Monday morning.
Pearlberg explained
Frank was pardoned in
how Frank’s court case was
1986, but the Georgia did not
sensationalized through
declare him innocent of the
the media. Schwartz recounted his two attempts Rabbi Stephen Lebow murder of 13-year-old Mary
Phagan at the Atlanta pencil
to secure a pardon for
factory he ran in April 1913.
Frank in the 1980s. Sears
raised awareness to the racial injus- Instead, the pardon acknowledged that
tices that still occur in America on a the state failed to give Frank a fair trial
and to protect him from the lynch mob.
regular basis.
Rabbi Lebow, who has champiSchuster said there are lessons to
oned Frank’s case for decades, said
be learned from Frank’s case today.
“As an attorney and now as a he’s on a mission to clear Frank’s name
judge,” he said, “This case is a reminder once and for all.
“If we today, like everyone in Georthat the rule of law should never be
overrun by the rule of the mob. We gia, wishes to put the painful legacy of
must answer to the Constitution, not Leo Frank aside,” he said, “then let us
acknowledge that it is not possible to
to the person who shouts the loudest.”
T-shirts and Coke bottles that read make the future good unless we are
“Leo Frank Innocent” were handed out willing to make the past right.”
He added: “We are living in the
at the event, held the day before the
centennial of Frank’s lynching a few newer South, where justice delayed is
justice denied.” ■
miles west of Kol Emeth along Ga. 120.
www.atlantajewishtimes.com
Goldstein
Recounts
Mob Terror
By Michael Jacobs
[email protected]
A
mob that formed outside a
Jewish-owned store in Marietta
after Leo Frank’s lynching Aug.
17, 1915, nearly overturned a streetcar
in its anti-Semitic fervor.
Marietta City Council member
Philip Goldstein told his family’s story
during Congregation Etz Chaim’s centennial event Sunday, Aug. 16.
The program included Chuck Clay,
a great-nephew of lynching planner
Herbert Clay, who speculated that guilt
led his grandfather Lucius, Herbert’s
brother, to be extra-vigilant when he
served as the postwar military governor of Germany during the Nuremberg
war-crimes trials.
Also speaking was lawyer Dale
Schwartz, the lead counsel in the effort to win a state pardon for Frank.
Schwartz revealed that the hero behind
the 1986 pardon was a Harvard student
named Clark Freshman, who managed to speak with the members of the
Board of Pardons and Paroles after they
rejected the first pardon petition two
years earlier. He helped devise wording
the board members would sign, then
carried the petition around to each of
them the day after Labor Day 1986.
But Goldstein’s tale of the summer of 1915 in Marietta brought home
the fear that drove many Jews to leave
Georgia after the lynching and c