By Jeffrey Melnick
An research of the Leo Frank case as a degree of the complexities characterizing the connection among African american citizens and Jews in the USA
In 1915 Leo Frank, a Northern Jew, was once lynched in Georgia. He have been convicted of the homicide of Mary Phagan, a tender white lady who labored within the Atlanta pencil manufacturing facility controlled through Frank. In a tumultuous trial in 1913 Frank's major accuser used to be Jim Conley, an African American worker within the manufacturing facility. was once Frank to blame?
In our time a martyr's air of mystery falls over Frank as a sufferer of non secular and neighborhood bigotry. The endless controversy has encouraged debates, video clips, books, songs, and theatrical productions. one of the inventive works fascinated about the case are a ballad via Fiddlin' John Carson, David Mamet's novel The outdated Religion in 1997, and Alfred Uhry and Jason Robert Brown's musical Parade in 1998.
Indeed, the Frank case has turn into a touchstone within the heritage of black-Jewish cultural kinfolk. How- ever, for too lengthy the trial has been oversimplified because the second whilst Jews famous their vulnerability in the US and started to make universal reason with African american citizens.
This learn has a distinct story to inform. It casts off outdated political and cultural luggage which will investigate the cultural context of Frank's trial, and to envision the tension put on the connection of African americans and Jews by way of it. the translation provided this is in keeping with deep archival study, analyses of the court docket documents, and research of assorted creative creations encouraged by way of the case. It means that the case will be understood as supplying conclusive early facts of the deep mutual mistrust among African american citizens and Jews, a mistrust that has been skillfully and cynically manipulated through strong white humans.
Black-Jewish kin on Trial is anxious much less with what truly occurred within the nationwide Pencil corporation manufacturing facility than with how Frank's trial, conviction, and lynching were used as an get together to discover black-Jewish kinfolk and the recent South. simply as with the O. J. Simpson trial, the Frank trial calls for that americans make a profound exam in their crucial ideals approximately race, sexuality, and gear.
Jeffrey Melnick is an assistant professor of yank experiences at Babson collage and the writer of A correct to Sing the Blues: African american citizens, Jews, and American well known Song.