The Shadow of Leo Frank

The Hagiography of Leo Frank and the ADL's Lasting Influence

Leo Frank, patron saint and martyr for the ADL, has played a crucial role in the creation story of the genesis of wokeslop. Leo Frank was essentially the first George Floyd, except instead of being a black drug addict robber, Leo Frank was a Jewish child rapist, which makes it all the more absurd.

I think, at this point, most of /ourguys/ are all well aware of who Leo Frank is, so this article isn’t really about that. Regardless, a brief overview is probably helpful on the off chance someone reading this has been living under a rock.

Mary Phagen was a former employee of Leo Frank, working at his pencil factory. She had been laid off due to shortages and had gone to the factory to collect her final paycheck on the night she was murdered. The night watchman (a black guy named Newt Lee) discovered her body in the basement the next day and informed police. Her body had two strange notes (probably forgeries) which implicated a black man as her assailant. Lee was the first suspect because of this, but later suspicions led investigators to believe Leo Frank was the assailant, and Lee was an accomplice. Eventually James “Jim” Conley (the black janitor) took his place as the suspected accomplice, and is also who the ADL and many historians today believe killed Mary Phagen. It’s worth noting that Leo Frank had a history of sexual misconduct allegations, and that virtually the only people who believed he was innocent were also Jewish.

The real difficulty with this case is that, in order to believe the theory that Jim Conley killed Mary Phagen you must necessarily believe that a mob of 20th century working-class Georgians decided to lynch a Jewish man instead of a black man, who was essentially being handed over to them on a silver platter. This is especially odd considering the fact that this was actually a time of relative prosperity for Jews in America, and a period of low antisemitism. Conversely, racial tensions between blacks and Whites were still high, and Conley himself was a man of rather ill-repute, so much so that his alibi for the murder and events surrounding it was literally that he was out in saloons drinking and gambling.

Facially, the case for Leo Frank is just odd. Were it not for the institutional influence of Jews I don’t see how this case could ever have been favorable to Frank. Without the taboo label of “antisemitism” this case becomes a very obvious example of a wealthy industrialist trying to exploit racial tensions to cover up his own wrongdoings. In other words, this case is textbook Marxist theory that racism is an invention of the wealthy Capitalist elite to insulate themselves from criticism. It is simply and utterly peculiar that issues of classism and anti-black racism are virtually unheard of in discussing this case; instead everyone is mysteriously in agreement that Leo Frank was completely innocent.

For what it’s worth, I think Leo Frank raped and killed Mary Phagen, while Conley tried to help Frank cover it up under his orders/promise of a reward. This was Conley’s own testimony and is generally consistent with the evidence provided in the case, particularly the mysterious “murder notes” which investigators believed were forgeries written by Conley. Conley was not a particularly stupid individual so it is rather difficult to believe he would write such incriminating notes on his own accord. It’s much more rational to believe that he was deceived into writing them by Frank as part of the coverup (wherein Frank would frame him for the murder).

It’s also worth noting that there were two major appeals for post-humous pardons. The first in 1982 was based on the “new evidence” testimony of Alonzo Mann (which was rejected for insufficient evidence) and a second in 1986 which was granted “Without attempting to address the question of guilt or innocence.”

The 1986 pardon of Leo Frank, or the “No pardon-pardon” as some call it.

Essentially, the State recognized their failure to protect Leo Frank while in their custody and decided to make a political overture towards the ADL. In more tangible terms, it’s like when an obviously guilty person has their conviction overturned on due process violations and is remanded for a new trial, except there is no new trial here because Frank is dead.

Finally, the Phagen family still maintains Leo Frank’s guilt to this day and you can read about their extensive thoughts on the subject at https://www.maryphagan.org/.

Maybe at some point I will write another article going over the case with a fine toothed comb to discuss it further, but that isn’t really what I want to talk about today. In fact, the murder itself isn’t really important for this article beyond contextualizing the actual topic. Instead I want to discuss the modern perception of the case.

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Most of you also know that the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) was founded as a direct response to the lynching of Leo Frank. In invoking the legal term “defamation” they are not only saying that the claims of Leo Frank’s guilt are false, but also that they are intentionally made to “defame” the character of Leo Frank and, implicitly, Jews in general. This is where we see the association with the Leo Frank case and antisemitism. Imagine, for a moment, that Leo Frank was not Jewish but was instead a White man of equal wealth and stature, but all other facts remained the same. Setting aside the fact that it is unlikely that “White Leo Frank” here would have had half the support of his real counterpart, we know implicitly that there would be no charge of “defamation.” We know this because it has never happened in any other case where a White man has been found guilty of any other atrocity (and Leo Frank WAS found guilty).

But with the real Leo Frank, accusing him of the murder of Mary Phagen (which is still the official State record no less) is considered not merely antisemitism, but an attempt to define the entire Jewish race.

Naturally, Leo Frank has become a sort of martyr for the Civil Rights crowd, which is especially funny since he was more than willing to throw two black men under the bus to save his own hide. During my time in undergrad Leo Frank’s name cropped up periodically as a Word of Power to invoke deep feelings of shame in White people.

The first time I ever encountered this was in my “Introduction to Criminology" (SOC-103) class, taught by a pudgy and greasy Jew who wore a mask every day. He made us watch this three part documentary titled “Race: The Power of an Illusion” which adopts the more extremist neo-Marxist/liberal view that race does not exist on any scientific level. As a short aside, the documentary itself was full of methodological issues which even I was able to identify such as the bizarre notion of matrilineal DNA in the mitochondria somehow disproving race from a scientific perspective. I’ve toyed with the idea of doing a full and proper rebuttal of the documentary before but the issues are so blatantly apparent and few people seem to even know about the documentary anyway (I’ve asked several of /ourguys/ and none of them had even heard of it, so I don’t expect normies to either) that it would be mostly pointless. Anyhow, Leo Frank is briefly mentioned in the documentary. Ostensibly, this is done to try and quickly pile up all of these cases of “hecking bigotry” to overpower the viewer with emotions of guilt/etc. However, this is sort of counter productive for the above mentioned reasons and really just serves to highlight the Jewishness of the documentary.

I would then encounter Leo Frank in passing in several other classes, generally as a footnote in the history of the Civil Rights Movement where professors simply take for granted his innocence since other academics seem to support it as well. This is particularly alarming and displays the tendency of modern academics to never question Civil Rights dogma, even when it is rather self contradictory.

The final time I encountered Leo Frank’s story was during my senior research seminar, when a girl in my class wrote the following in her introductory paragraph (which I was peer reviewing):

After the showing of the film A Birth of a Nation (1915) by D.W. Griffith, depicted Black American men being sexually aggressive towards White American women. This reignited the feelings of the early KKK and all of the prejudices that came with it. Soon after the showing of this film, a Jewish man, Leo Frank, was suspected of killing a thirteen-year-old White girl. A mob of anti-Semitic men kidnapped Frank from the Atlanta prison and he was lynched. This was the beginning of the reemergence of the KKK.¹

This excerpt caused me to open a new Substack draft titled “The Shadow of Leo Frank” (yes, this article has been sitting in drafts for around a year now) which has become the article you are reading today. I think this excerpt is a perfect microcosm of the hypocritical understandings which underpin the hagiography of Leo Frank.

Also, it’s worth noting that antisemitism was virtually nonexistent in the First Klan. The First Klan was a vigilante organization that primarily targeted freed blacks and Northerners/Northern sympathizers in the Reconstruction era. The “terror cell” aspect of the First Klan is largely blown way out of proportion, and they had next to no concern with White ethnics, Jews, Catholics, etc. contrary to the belief of many. This things arose only with the Second Klan, which was a significant departure from the First Klan in basically every regard.

To dissect this quote a little further, let’s start at the beginning. Setting aside the clunky verbiage, the first sentence (as memory serves, this was the hook paragraph of her paper) of the excerpt invokes A Birth of a Nation [It’s actually The Birth of a Nation but whatever] in depicting black men as sexually aggressive towards White women. This is juxtaposed with a sentence suggesting that Leo Frank was kidnapped and lynched by “[a] mob of anti-Semitic men” with no further elaboration.

This was so jarring to me when first reading her paper that I immediately knew I was going to write an article about it. The depths of hypocrisy and sheer stupidity to which one must dive in order to outline the reason why working-class White Georgians in the early 20th Century would have every reason to lynch Jim Conley and then note that they still lynched Leo Frank. Truly incredible.

Setting aside the obvious implication that women should not be allowed to vote, this highlights how fragile the understanding of the Leo Frank case is for most people. Jews take Frank’s innocence for granted because they are Jews and because it is rhetorically useful in modern discussions of antisemitism (also because it would undercut a lot of the ADL’s legitimacy if Leo Frank was prove guilty without any doubt). Normies, however, only assume Frank’s innocence because that is what they are told by [Jewish/Jewish aligned] academics.

I don’t know that this girl had any understanding of the Leo Frank case beyond the fact that many modern historians have attempted to exonerate Frank. I sincerely doubt she was familiar with the facts of the case, and I wouldn’t even be surprised if she was unaware that Frank tried to frame a black man.

But it raises an interesting question. How easy might it really be to weaponize the libtard against it’s Jewish master? We’ve already seen the beginning of such a rift form between Jews and more extreme leftists in regard to the Gaza conflict. Libtards consistently support who they perceive as the oppressed underdog, and they only support Leo Frank in a vacuum where he is framed by racist Southerners.

What happens when you make a compelling case for Jim Conley? What happens when the poor, innocent, hard working black janitor is framed by the wealthy Jewish industrialist Leo Frank? What happens when you point out the endless number of global and national institutions which seek to falsely accuse a poor, innocent, black man to save the reputation of an evil industrialist?

The facts are already there, it merely requires the proper rhetorical spin. I think the possibilities here are endless. I can only imagine the rhetorical effect that a comparative analysis of the money raised to defend Leo Frank vs. that which was raised to defend Jim Conley might have on Twitter Commies.

I’ve never really subscribed to the notion that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” but it’s still worth noting that they are your enemy’s enemy nonetheless.

1. This is an excerpt from the rough draft of a paper I had to peer review in one of my classes during undergrad. I obviously won’t be naming the girl who wrote it here, and I have waited until well after graduation to post this article so as to avoid the risk of a plagiarism checker leading university staff to me.