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And the Dead Shall Rise: The Murder of Mary Phagan and the Lynching of Leo Frank. By Steve Oney. (New York: Pantheon Books, c. 2003. Pp. [x], 742. $35.00, ISBN 0-679-42147-5.)
By now the broad outlines of this grim story are well known. On April 27, 1913, Atlanta policemen-summoned by the night watchman of the National Pencil Factory-discovered the body of thirteen-year-old Mary Phagan, a precociously beautiful young woman who had earned ten cents an hour inserting rubber erasers into the metal tips of pencils. Five months later in an atmosphere of hysteria whipped up by Atlanta's sensationalist press, a jury found the Jewish superintendent of the factory, Leo Frank, guilty of having murdered the young woman. Most remarkably, the conviction rested primarily upon the testimony of Jim Conley, a black factory sweeper with a criminal record who would seem to have been the logical suspect. After Governor John Slaton commuted Frank's death sentence in June 1915 because of his concerns over the reliability of the evidence, a group of the most prominent community leaders in nearby Marietta-goaded on by the one-time Populist standard-bearer Tom Watson-planned a bold plot to seize and lynch Frank. Late on the evening of August 15 twenty-five self-appointed "Knights of Mary Phagan" broke into the Milledgeville prison, seized Frank at gunpoint, drove him more than 150 miles to a wooded grove in Cobb County, and hanged him. Although the identity of most of the men were well known at the time, none were ever charged with the crime or even inconvenienced.
In the ninety-two years since the death of Mary Phagan and the lynching of Leo...