THE LYNCHING OF LEO FRANK

Hardback. 1st UK edn. Until publication, only once had a Southern jury convicted a white man of a capital offence on the testimony of a Negro. The white man was Leo Frank, and he was convicted of the murder of 14yr. old Mary Phagan, a factory worker, not because the jury believed his Negro accuser, but because Frank was a Jew and a capitalist. Mary Phagan was found murdered in the basement of the National Pencil Company in Atlanta in April 1913. The police charged Leo M. Frank, the superintendent of the factory. The jury found him guilty and he was sentenced to be hanged. Two years later, the Governor of Georgia, believing that Frank had not had a fair trial, commuted his sentence to life imprisonment. On August 17, 1915, Frank was seized by a lynch mob, driven over 175 miles of dirt roads and hanged from an oak tree near the house where Mary Phagan was born. The news of Frank's lynching shocked the civilised world. There is little doubt that Frank was innocent. Illus., Appendices, Selected Bibliog. + Dramatis Personae. 363pp. 8vo. h/back. Vg+ in sunned Vg. pcdw.