“It’s too big a hole to put you in,” Mary’s mother, Fannie, cried at her funeral. Two mysterious notes lay nearby, purportedly written by her and incriminating “a long tall black negro”. In the small hours of the next morning she was found in the basement, her head gashed, her dress hitched up, a cord around her neck.
That lunchtime she received her pay-$1.20-but never left the factory. Meanwhile the factories that powered the city’s resurgence ran partly on child labour.Ĭhildren such as Mary, who, at 13, had been employed to operate a machine that inserted erasers into the tips of pencils. April 26th was Confederate Memorial Day, and Atlanta’s parade featured hundreds of real, limping veterans: the civil war’s wounds, physical and psychic, were still tender. But in other respects the place was less recognisable. Public transport, like the streetcar Mary rode into town, was at least as reliable as today’s. Then, as now, its boosters peddled an optimistic version of the city as economically progressive and racially harmonious. In some ways, Georgia’s capital hasn’t changed all that much in the intervening century. The case generally goes by Leo Frank’s name, but it began two years before his death, when, on April 26th 1913, Mary Phagan went to collect her pay at the National Pencil Company in Atlanta. In the pain that still reverberates on its centenary, the story is a reminder that history can often be wrenchingly personal. Now the case bears witness to the tenacity of the past-at once inescapable and intractable-and asks whether memory always illuminates the present, or rather sometimes poisons it. Alive and raw 100 years on, it has acquired new resonances and meanings. The tawdry, riveting affair combined skulduggery and shockingly public violence depravity and courage atavistic trauma and neuroses about modernity (for which, as they often do, Jews served as avatars). Reputedly the only anti-Semitic lynching in American history, Frank’s death shocked the country and traumatised its Jews. They did it for the little girl who had been murdered. They didn’t help to kill Frank because he was a Jew, as many then believed and still do. They were not just a pair of redneck extremists. He wanted everyone at the talk to know that, shortly after that episode, the Burton brothers enlisted in the American army and rode away in a boxcar to fight in the first world war. What did the speaker know of the part played by the Burton brothers, Emmett and Luther? Only, came the reply, that the Burtons rode in the back of the car with Frank as, in his nightshirt and handcuffs, he was driven through the darkness to Marietta, and his death.Įmmett Burton was my father, the old man said Luther was my uncle. When a list of the lynchers was projected onto the synagogue wall, the old man called out. At last the lecture reached the night in August 1915 when Leo Frank was abducted by a gang, brought to this very neighbourhood, and hanged from a tree. THE old man sat in the synagogue, jiggling his leg as he waited for the story’s grim climax.
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