Sens. Ossoff and Warnock Must Sever their Leo Frank Connection
Sens. Ossoff and Warnock Must Sever the Leo Frank Connection
Jews in America and particularly in the South have been energized by the election of Jon Ossoff to the Senate, the first Jew from Georgia to have that distinction. He was buoyed by the strong appeal to Black voters of fellow candidate the Rev. Raphael Warnock, who, as one commentator said, “had the coattails that delivered Ossoff’s win.” Their victories have given the Democrats a voting majority in the senate that, it is said, will remove legislative obstacles to the Biden agenda. The added benefit is the “rekindling” of the storied Black–Jewish alliance that some claim was the driver of the civil rights movement.
In their self-congratulatory euphoria Jews have promoted an entirely misleading narrative of a collegial history of Black–Jewish togetherness, commonality, and coalition that raises more eyebrows than smiles among rank-and-file Blacks who know better. Their melodramatic dreamscape often casts Ossoff as the second coming of another Jewish Georgian named Leo Frank, the B’nai B’rith president who was convicted of the 1913 murder of 13-year-old Mary Phagan, one of the many Gentile child laborers at the Jewish-owned Atlanta pencil factory he managed. The murder led to Frank’s trial, conviction, and his ultimate lynching, which is said to be the “worst incidence of anti-Semitism in American history.” The Ossoff cheerleaders have posed the 2021 election of a Jew as a “new era” in race relations that finally “heals the wounds” of Southern Jews who have lived under the pain of the Leo Frank affair for more than a century. Moment magazine’s slant is typical of that sentiment: “The wolves of hate had hunted Black and Jewish Georgians for too long. In 1915, the lynching of Jewish-American Leo Frank…gave way to a resurgence of the Klu Klux Klan.”
But the Jewish rehashing of the Leo Frank case is simply a cunning corruption of an unfortunate history: raising Leo Frank from the dead may be therapeutic but it also whitewashes a history of Jewish racial treachery in the South that Blacks—and especially Sen. Warnock—should “Never Forget.”
Jews and Black slavery have been connected in Georgia since its earliest colonial settlement in the 1700s. Jews had enjoyed a full freedom in the colony, but abandoned the place, according to historian Rabbi Jacob Rader Marcus, because “Negro slavery was prohibited, the liquor traffic was forbidden.” When the colony’s leaders relented and permitted slavery, Jews returned and bought, sold, and worked enslaved Africans without reservation. Every one of the founders of Georgia’s Jewish community was a slave owner and they regularly placed advertisements in Georgia newspapers seeking to buy and sell human beings and soliciting help hunting down freedom-seeking “runaways.” For nearly two centuries Blacks and Jews in Georgia had a relationship, but it was no “coalition.” According to Steven Hertzberg, “There is little evidence to suggest that any of Atlanta’s Jews desired a greater amelioration in the condition of blacks”; rather, they “clearly benefited from the system of white supremacy.”
By the time of the trial of Leo Frank for the rape and murder of Mary Phagan in 1913, Jews had grown wealthy and satisfied with profits they derived from the slavery and Jim Crow systems, and they saw Blacks as no more than menial laborers and domestic servants. Atlanta industrialist and Chamber of Commerce official Oscar Pappenheimer was also one of the owners of the National Pencil Company, where Leo Frank committed the murder. In 1906, Pappenheimer actually wrote to the Atlanta Constitution to make a “practical suggestion” for “negroes”:
“I propose the registration of negroes in the southern states 14 years of age and more….Each person so registered should possess…a certificate…in which should be entered description, date and place of birth and, at each registration, record of abode, employment, conduct and reference….[T]hese certificates would before long be of great value to industrious, well-behaved people. Let others decide whether it be legal to pass laws bearing on this subject with reference to the colored race only…”
Pappenheimer’s “suggestion” was nearly identical to that which Adolf Hitler enforced against Jews thirty years later. This overt and public race hate from such a prominent member of Atlanta’s Jewish elite represents the racial mentality of the Jews of the South at the time of the Leo Frank case.
The actual racial history of Jews helps us to understand why it was so easy for them to go to such great lengths to pin the Phagan murder on a Black man—indeed, two Black men! They claim that the “real killer” was a Black man named James Conley, a sweeper at the factory, but the ugly reality is that the evidence overwhelmingly points to Leo Frank as the murderer of Mary Phagan.
First, when Frank was suspected of the crime, the wealthy Jewish owners of the pencil factory immediately hired the best attorneys as well as two of the most prominent American private detective firms—the Pinkerton and Burns agencies—to investigate the murder. Both agencies concluded exactly what the Atlanta police had found—that Leo Frank was the murderer of Little Mary Phagan. Frank was indicted by a grand jury that included five Jews, some being prominent members of Frank’s own synagogue.
In fact, Atlanta police began to suspect Frank because a strange series of “clues” popped up that appeared to point to a Black employee of Frank’s named Newt Lee, a night watchman at the factory who had discovered the girl’s body hidden in the basement. Police officers found that “evidence” had been planted to frame Lee and that attorneys and private security personnel working for Frank were the likely culprits. Frank produced Lee’s factory timecard that was obviously and suspiciously altered to show that Lee had time to commit the crime. Only Frank could have engineered that clumsy caper and it fooled no one. Next, police searched Lee’s home and found a bloody shirt in his laundry bin—but it was right after being told by Frank’s attorneys that “evidence” might be found there. The bloody shirt episode became the single incident that solidified police suspicion of the pencil factory manager, and the police arrested Frank and charged him with murder. And the Black man he tried to frame, Newt Lee, became a solid witness for the prosecution in the murder trial.
Leo Frank’s History of Racist Hate
As the president of the Atlanta chapter of the Jewish organization B’nai B’rith, Leo Frank was arguably the most important Jewish leader in the South. And so his exoneration became a matter of Jewish national security. Such a high-ranking Jew on trial for the shocking murder of a Gentile child, Jews believed, would be too harmful a burden for American Jews. In 1913, the group’s Anti-Defamation League had just been formed in Chicago and they were seeking a way to heighten publicity and donations for their cause. Such ulterior Jewish motives seem to have blinded many Jews to the actual facts of the murder and the surrounding issues that led Frank’s own detectives to accuse him of such a heinous crime.
The physical and circumstantial evidence all pointed unfailingly to Frank and even the ADL’s own expert, Steve Oney, had to admit, “I think there was a reasonable case against Leo Frank.” So “anti-Semitism” was not the driver of Frank’s prosecution. And as the case against him mounted, Frank made a fateful and hateful decision that his defense against the murder charge would be pure unadulterated anti-Black racism.
Frank publicly and openly referred to Blacks as “niggers.” His defense attorneys used the word “nigger” and other racist slurs dozens of times in court. His main attorney attempted to impeach the damning testimony of Black witnesses by telling the jury: “If you put a nigger in a hopper, he’ll drip lies.” One Black witness, Frank’s lawyers told the jury, “is a plain, beastly, ragged, filthy, lying nigger” who came from “a law-breaking race.”
The defense attorneys tried to explain away the planted bloody shirt incident but only exposed just how deep in the gutter they were willing to go. Luther Rosser was questioning the medical examiner on the witness stand:
Rosser: The shirt had the odor of blood on it when you first got it, didn’t it?
Yes.
Rosser: Then, wouldn’t the odor of blood have killed the odor of nigger?
No.
Rosser: Then, if a nigger had just put on his shirt and had taken it off in an instant, your nose would “get him”?
Have you ever smelled a negro, Mr. Rosser?
Rosser: More than you ever smelled. I was smelling them before you were born.
Frank’s legal team argued in court (and long after) that Blacks should not be believed—simply because they were Black—and that “negro testimony” was by definition inferior and unreliable. Further, Leo Frank argued that murder, rape, and robbery were “negro crimes” and thus, as a white man, he could not have committed the murder of Mary Phagan. And those arguments—which would have horrified Martin Luther King—were not simply trial gaffes or personal opinions: the national Jewish leadership campaigned for two years after Frank’s conviction using those profoundly racist “arguments” as their legal strategy.
Leo Frank: The Harvey Weinstein of Atlanta
But the testimony of Black witnesses was not Frank’s only problem. The National Pencil Company was filled with young women and girls—child laborers working long hours at starvation wages. It seems that Frank had a Harvey-Weinstein-Dominique-Strauss-Kahn-like habit of pressuring these vulnerable girls into sexual situations. One hundred years before the #MeToo revolution twenty of the young female factory employees swore under oath to the sexual harassment they suffered at the “lascivious” hands of Leo Frank. They testified that Frank ogled them, brushed up against them, touched their breasts, made lewd and suggestive remarks, and invaded their dressing room without knocking. Their testimony was so powerful that none of Frank’s attorneys dared to cross-examine them—not one. A white man confessed that he and Frank brought women to and had alcohol in the factory after hours.
Later, the Jewish advertising magnate who financed Frank’s many legal appeals, Albert Lasker, admitted that after he and colleagues met the B’nai B’rith president for the very first time: “It was very hard for us to be fair to him, he impressed us as a sexual pervert.” Little Mary Phagan, it was proven in court, had mightily resisted Frank’s sexual advances before being knocked unconscious and then strangled.
Of course, none of this Jewish race hate and sexual violence made it into the voluminous Leo Frank literature. But that has changed. The Nation of Islam’s The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews, Volume Three: The Leo Frank Case: The Lynching of a Guilty Man is a 536-page study referenced with thousands of footnotes and illustrated with maps, diagrams, and graphics that touch on every aspect of this controversial case. And though it was received enthusiastically by scholars of the case, it was banned from being sold on Amazon.com in 2019. Ron Unz offered his view that “It honestly seemed like one of the most thorough and detailed studies of a controversial historical event I’ve ever read, far superior to even the vast majority of top academic works.”
The great niece of the murdered girl is also named after her great aunt. Mary Phagan-Kean has studied the case for years. She wrote a book on the subject titled The Murder of Little Mary Phagan and maintained that Leo Frank was in fact the murderer and that to ignore the mountains of damning evidence is a calumny against her family and the cause of justice. Mrs. Phagan-Kean has endorsed the findings of the Nation of Islam:
“Nation of Islam volume is the most well-researched book published regarding the rape and murder of little Mary Phagan to date. The Phagan family appreciates the detail Nation of Islam brought to the case analysis.”
Those who can find something redeemable in the Leo Frank legend must necessarily ignore the Jewish racism and sexual violence that permeated the case. And that is just the beginning. The history of Jewish racism goes well beyond the Frank case—it was at the core of Jewish life in Atlanta, in Georgia, and throughout the South.
Before Rev. Warnock’s impressive senate victory he had aligned himself with a Jewish man of great character when he said:
“The Nation of Islam is significant….Its voice has been important even for the development of Black theology, because it was the Black Muslims who challenged Black preachers and said that ‘you’re promulgating … the white man’s religion. That’s a slave religion. You’re telling people to focus on heaven; meanwhile, they’re catching hell.’ And so we’ve needed the witness of the Nation of Islam, in a real sense, to put a fire under us and keep us honest about the meaning of the proclamation coming from our pulpits.” (See video below)
Bro. Warnock may not have known it at the time of his stated “significance” of the Nation of Islam but his 2013 analysis mirrors the testimony of the civil rights martyr Andrew Goodman, who was killed in the battle for justice along with James Chaney and Michael Schwerner. Goodman thoughtfully wrote:
“…it is true that the white man (and by this I mean Christian civilization in general) has proved himself to be the most depraved devil imaginable in his attitudes towards the Negro race….The source and cause of this need for reaction can be attributed to white contempt and neglect. The historical contempt that the white race held for the Negroes has created a group of rootless degraded people. The current neglect of the problem can only irritate this deplorable state of affairs. The Black Muslims should constitute a warning to our society, a warning that must be heeded if we are to preserve the society. The road to freedom must be uphill, even if it is arduous and frustrating. A people must have dignity and identity. If they can’t do it peacefully, they will do it defensively.”
Senator Warnock’s witness of the Nation of Islam and the ultimate sacrifice of Andrew Goodman proves that his role models for leadership are solid and enduring. If there ever was a Black-Jewish coalition, Goodman—a very good man—was at the core. In today’s moment of great trauma and division leaders of great moral and intellectual character are desperately needed to correct a nation and a world on the brink of collapse.
Both Sens. Ossoff and Warnock, and nearly all of the unsuspecting public, have been brutally hoodwinked by a disingenuous Jewish leadership that has chosen to make Leo Frank—an unrepentant race hater, child rapist and murderer—into a Jesus figure for the Jewish people. If Jon Ossoff and the Jewish world choose to take Leo Frank as their model of racial climate change—as many Jews have demanded they do— Bro. Warnock and his Black supporters should shake Ossoff off his coattails and sprint in the opposite direction.
UPCOMING: Part 2: Before Leo Frank: The Secret Relationship Between Georgia’s Blacks and Jews
Listen to the audiobook produced by the American Mercury of The Secret Relationship Between Blacks & Jews, Vol. 3: Leo Frank: The Lynching of a Guilty Man:
Now an Audio Book: The Leo Frank Case: The Lynching of a Guilty Man, part 1
The Rev. Raphael Warnock’s statement on the significance of the Nation of Islam: