Here's Where It Gets Interesting - The Vigilantes, Episode 1

Episode Date: March 18, 2024

A shocking murder. A scene so brutal that the first people to find the victim couldn’t even tell what their skin color was. And a case that forever changed both the city, and the state’s legal system.  It was April 1913, in Atlanta, Georgia, and the city would never be the same. You may wonder why this imperative and dramatic case is not taught in history class, or how the world could have forgotten such a horrific crime that continues to have an impact more than 100 years later.  Join us for part one of this seven-episode series, and experience just how powerful of a motivator fear can be.  Host/ Executive Producer: Sharon McMahon Supervising Producer: Melanie Buck Parks Audio Producer: Jenny Snyder  Writers: Amy Watkin, Sharon McMahon Researched by: Kari Anton, Sharon McMahon, Amy Watkin, Mandy Reid, Melanie Buck Parks  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Head to SharonMcMahon.com slash ad free to subscribe today. April 1913, Atlanta, Georgia. A moment in time that would forever change a city and its people and the scene of a murder so shocking, so brutal, The first people to find the victim couldn't even tell what their skin color was. More than 100 years later, this story has ripple effects today. It may well be the most important and dramatic legal case in Georgia's past, but it's not taught in history class. By the end of this series, you'll wonder how the world could have forgotten something so sinister, so heartbreaking, and so hateful. This is a true story that is complicated and interconnected to its time and place,

so let me walk you through it in this seven-episode series. By the time it ends, two lives will be cut far too short. I'm Sharon McMahon, and here's where it gets interesting. Two lives will be cut far too short. I'm Sharon McMahon, and here's where it gets interesting. Let's go back to Georgia at the beginning of the 20th century and introduce you to the people involved. Our story begins with a young man named Leo Frank. Leo was born in Texas on April 17, 1884, but his family moved to New York City when he was very small. That's where his mom was from. Leo's dad was a recent Jewish immigrant from Germany. The Frank family was like thousands of other working-class immigrant

families in New York City, pursuing their own version of the American dream. At a time when it was common for people to live packed together in tiny rooms in rundown neighborhoods, Leo's family was moving up in the world. They had a multi-room apartment in a building with other white-collar professionals. You know those old photos of little boys from the early 1900s with the jackets and shorts, their socks pulled halfway up their calves, leaving their knees exposed to the world? Leo was that kid. He had big brown eyes and brown hair parted near the middle, combed back with oil or maybe brilliantine.

He wore a little wool suit with short pants that reached his knees and long black socks and high black boots that buttoned up the sides. His white shirt collar and wide tie peeked out of the top of his suit jacket. It was common at the time for a boy under 10 years old to be dressed like a miniature businessman, but for an immigrant son, it was an even more important statement of prestige and intention for a successful future in America. In 1900, life expectancy and health outcomes were worse in Gilded Age America than they were 200 years prior. Only around 4% of the eligible United States student population enrolled in high school, and just under 1% went to college.

Many children had to quit school and go to work before finishing 8th grade, but Leo finished high school and went on to pursue higher education. Leo first attended the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, which at the time was a trade school to give young people from all backgrounds a hands-on education in state-of-the-art skills. This was the school to attend back then. The Pratt Institute was revolutionary for its time. Not only did it have Brooklyn's first free library open to both students and faculty, the Institute also accepted women and trained them alongside the male students in most programs. The Pratt Institute welcomed all races into their classroom, so Leo was exposed to women and people of color perhaps earlier and in a more positive

environment than many people of his time. After finishing at Pratt, Leo attended Cornell to study mechanical engineering. He was a good student, probably even a champion nerd, and he was also a good friend. One of his former classmates called him, quote, the picture of honor and loyalty. Leo loved to read, often while listening to classical music on his Victrola. His favorites were waltzes at a time when most people his age were probably listening to ragtime, blues, and jazz. I'd describe Leo as buttoned up, especially in terms of how he wanted things done.

He liked things the way he liked them. He stuck to schedules and insisted on working hard. In 1906, the same year Leo was graduating from college in the North, a very different event was unfolding in the South, in Atlanta, Georgia. Atlanta's population was growing. In 1900, 89,000 people lived there, and 10 years later, the population was 150,000. The Black population in Atlanta was growing at an even faster rate. Industries were booming, and all of those people crowding into the same place put pressure on city services and increased the competition for jobs. on city services and increase the competition for jobs. White city leaders sought to control these issues by enforcing and expanding Jim Crow laws to keep white and Black people separate.

For example, Georgia enforced separate parks for white and Black people, and courtrooms in Atlanta kept two Bibles, one for Blacks and one for whites. Despite Jim Crow, Black men did obtain voting rights, and some were able to start businesses, get elected to office, and pursue higher education. This led to backlash in white communities. In fact, the white male candidates for governor in the 1906 election openly campaigned on the strength of their abilities to keep Black people disenfranchised. Morehouse history professor Clarissa Myrick Harris notes that the gubernatorial campaigns were very clear. Candidates said things like, We can't have Negro rule. We have to stop them. We have to keep them from voting.

They're getting too uppity. They're taking over. Atlanta residents in 1906 were inundated with stories in the local newspapers about Black men assaulting white women, Black men getting drunk in the city's saloons, and Black businessmen losing track of their, quote, place by trying to compete with white businesses. Those newspapers made money and had real influence, and they wanted to use it to minimize the advancements of the Black community. Let's just say it wasn't a coincidence that both gubernatorial candidates were publishers or editors of two of Atlanta's biggest newspapers, the Atlanta Journal and the Atlanta Constitution. It was the continuation of yellow journalism that had become popular in the 1800s.

Yellow journalism was what you might call a tabloid today. It emphasizes a sensational story instead of facts. There were writers and even entire newspapers that never concerned themselves with actual events, choosing instead to write the headlines and stories that sold papers, even if they had to make those stories up. As I mentioned, Atlanta newspapers, including the ones affiliated with the two candidates for governor, ran several stories in 1906 detailing assaults on white women. Newspapers back then printed several editions each day, and often the afternoon and evening editions gave even more graphic details of these assaults. None of those newspaper stories of this time about Black men assaulting white women were ever found to be true. In fact, as Dr. Myra Karras says,

quote, in a couple of cases, the white women said, no, that's not true. That didn't happen to me. But that didn't matter. You had the Atlanta, Georgia newspaper publish a three-part series of editorials on the reign of terror for seven women. Seven white women became a pawn in the plan of essentially destroying the Black community and Black men, most notably. There was a fear of Black rule. On Saturday, September 22, 1906, stories of four more assaults were printed, and white men and boys flooded the streets in downtown Atlanta, many of them armed or grabbing whatever they could find to use as weapons. They were yelling, get them all, kill the Negroes.

The crowd grew throughout the day and raged through the city, attacking hundreds of Black people. They smashed windows of Black-owned businesses and beat whoever they found inside. I know it's awful to imagine what people went through. 22-year-old Milton Brown was walking home from a friend's house when he crossed paths with 75 white men who were in a frenzy of destruction. Atlanta police officers watched this crowd shoot Milton three times in the chest, shoulder, and head, and did not intervene. times in the chest, shoulder, and head and did not intervene. Milton lay on the street bleeding,

saying he hadn't known anything about the mob or why they were there before he died. Some of the rioters marched into Black neighborhoods, waving newspapers and shouting, the time to strike back is now. The Atlanta city government failed to calm people down and finally called in the state militia. But even the militia didn't really slow down the attacks. It wasn't until heavy rain fell that people began to disperse. Sunday's papers reported that all was well because Black people had been scared off of Atlanta's streets. Armed police and militia patrolled the city, protecting white property. White vigilante groups, mysteriously invisible to the patrols, continued to raid Black communities. And two days later, a group of Black people held a meeting in Brownsville, a community just outside of Atlanta.

Black people held a meeting in Brownsville, a community just outside of Atlanta. Police heard that this group was armed and they raided the town, leading to a shootout in which an officer was killed and more than 250 black men were arrested. One of those black men was named Zeb Long, who was arrested for, quote, incendiary talk about the way white people were treating Negroes. Let me underscore this point. Black citizens weren't even allowed to mention out loud how terrible it was that men were roaming the streets murdering Black people indiscriminately. Remember, Jim Crow laws had made it illegal for Black people to own guns, so they were unarmed as mobs with firearms confronted them. Zeb was in the town jail when a group of 50 white men showed up before dawn and took him from his cell with little to no resistance from police.

Police usually didn't use force to resist mobs intending to lynch Black people. This mob of white men put a rope around Zeb's neck, drove him out of town, and lynched him. A public memorial was erected in Zeb's memory in 2022, the same year petitions were made to change the name of the Atlanta Race Riots to the Atlanta Race Massacre. the name of the Atlanta Race Riots to the Atlanta Race Massacre. Somewhere between 25 and 40 Black people were killed in the Atlanta Race Massacre of 1906. Two white people died, including a woman who died from a heart attack after seeing the mobs near her home. City officials met with white and Black business owners who all agreed to end the violence because it was hurting Atlanta's economy. These agreements actually further divided Atlanta as black elites tried to distance themselves from those who were less well-off. There's no way to know for sure

what Leo Frank would have done if he had been in Atlanta at the time of the race massacre. Frank would have done if he had been in Atlanta at the time of the race massacre. Someone who knew him at the time described Leo as the most polished of gentlemen, with the kindest of hearts and the broadest of sympathy. But until we're directly confronted by a situation, there's no way to know how we might react to it. Leo was definitely a person of great privilege in many ways. Being a man with family connections opened doors for him. He had an education and jobs that weren't available to women or people of color, but Leo was disadvantaged because he was the child of an immigrant and because he was Jewish. And it's hard to overstate just how those pieces stacked against him later. Leo was the debating team coach at Cornell, and apparently his genius found expression in three-phase generators and foundry work.

And for those of us without engineering degrees, that means that during Leo's two college internships, he worked on things like a new industry-changing service, the water meter. But there was another crucial tool for all industries that was important at the time, a tool we don't think about much anymore, the pencil. And it was pencils that brought Leo to Atlanta. Well, actually, a pencil factory. And that factory would bring together a handful of people whose lives would become intertwined. After graduating with his mechanical engineering degree from Cornell in 1906, Leo traveled to Germany, his father's home country, to learn more about the pencil manufacturing process at a company called Eberhard Faber. Faber was the first company in the world to

mass-produce pencils, a tool absolutely essential to millions of people back then. And Germany had been at the forefront of the engineering renaissance for almost the entire 19th century, so Leo had a lot to learn there. When folks at Faber realized that graphite deposits and plentiful cedar trees were available in the United States, they knew they had the makings of a potentially perfect pencil just across the ocean, and they opened factories there. One unique feature of American pencils was the attached eraser developed in the early 1900s. In episode two, I'll introduce you to another key figure in our story whose job at the National Pencil Company was attaching these metal rings to hold these erasers in place. In 1908, Leo's uncle offered him a job at the factory he co-owned, the National

Pencil Company in Atlanta. It was just a few blocks away from the epicenter of the Atlanta Race Massacre, which had happened only two years prior. Leo was 24 when he moved to Atlanta and became a supervisor at the pencil factory. He couldn't possibly have known then how this move would seal his fate. Being from New York City, Leo probably wasn't intimidated by bustling Atlanta. Streetcars, two-passenger roadsters, and people crowding the sidewalks in their hats and suits and long skirts that would have all seemed familiar. Leo found himself in Atlanta that had recently been through quite a lot and had more turmoil in its future. Some of that subsequent unrest would be because of Leo. On the surface, it probably seemed as if Leo had little to worry about. As supervisor of the pencil factory, he earned a good living and was able to live in a decent neighborhood.

Leo made about $150 a month, which was a very nice salary, especially considering his average factory worker made about $24 a month. Georgia was known as the Empire State of the South because of its rapid industrialization, and coming from New York, Leo was right at home. The Georgian economy was moving from farming to factories. In fact, industry increased in Atlanta alone by 75 percent between 1900 and 1905. percent between 1900 and 1905. In 1850, there were 26 Jewish people living in Atlanta, and by 1908, when Leo arrived, there were 4,200. And people like Leo's father were immigrating to the United States in large numbers. Many Americans felt threatened by this rapid flow of immigrants. They believed they were losing their country to foreigners,

many of whom didn't dress or speak or practice their faith in ways that were familiar to many white Anglo-Saxon Protestant Americans. And fear, as we'll soon see, is a powerful driver of behavior. as we'll soon see, is a powerful driver of behavior. As the racial and cultural profile of the country changed rapidly, two schools of thought battled over how to deal with all the new immigrants. Progressives wanted to teach them about American history and democracy and how to be good citizens. They ran voluntary programs through organizations like the Daughters of the American Revolution and the YMCA. The programs offered lectures in multiple languages covering American

government and history, as well as the spirit of true Americanism. The YMCA alone boasted about having 30,000 eager students around the country in 1914. Conservatives felt that in order for new immigrants to become fully Americanized, they needed to completely lose their native cultures and language. One of those conservatives, businessman Henry Ford, was known for requiring his foreign-born workers to attend intensive Americanization classes at his factories. The Fourth of July at Ford Motor Company headquarters was called Americanization Day, and workers would walk from a large model boat, while wearing clothing from their native countries, into a large pot labeled Melting Pot, where the teachers would stir with 10-foot ladles.

The workers would then emerge from the pot in typical American clothes, waving American flags. These classes were not optional if you wanted to keep your job at Ford Motor Company. 24-year-old Leo looked a lot like he had as a child. He still had those big brown eyes and combed back dark hair with a straight part on the side, but instead of the shorts, he now wore a wool suit with full-length pants and a fashionable white shirt collar that nearly covered the top of his tie. In pictures, Leo's face often seems subdued, even bored. He looked through small round glasses that pinched his nose to stay on. Those glasses alone demonstrated a level of wealth, as only people with disposable income could afford something like eyeglasses. He had

a slight cleft in his chin, full lips, and perfect eyebrows. One Atlanta newspaper later described him as too pretty to be a Southern boy. This phrase meant more than just, oh, here's a guy who moved from somewhere else. It identified Leo as an outsider, even a target, because he was an educated, industrialist, Jewish New Yorker. The tension and anger that created fertile ground for the Atlanta Race Massacre was still simmering. And for some, that anger and prejudice extended to Jews, too. The National Pencil Company that Leo worked for was not particularly cutting edge, although it was brand new when Leo got there. Unions were gaining traction around the country,

but pencil company workers were not unionized. They did employ women and children in the factory and African Americans in custodial positions, all of which would have been normal or even progressive for that time in the South. By all accounts, Leo was a responsible, if not awkward, young man he kept to himself and seemed to prefer work over most other things. So it's not really shocking that Leo only had one girlfriend in his entire life. that Leo only had one girlfriend in his entire life. He met Lucille Selig about a week after he rented a room in her aunt's Atlanta home, which happened to be down the street from her parents' house. Less than two months later, they were regularly seen together at social functions and the theater.

Lucille was the kind of girl who seemed to burst with life and energy. Early in their courtship, someone asked Lucille what attracted her to Leo, and she replied, I like to make him blush. Lucille had large eyes and full brunette hair, which was later described in an Atlanta newspaper as the perfect type. It was usually pinned on top of her head in the Gibson girl puffy twist that was popular at the time, which can really only be done right if one is blessed with thick hair. She had just the right clothes for any time of day and even sported the new hobble skirt with the hem so narrow it was hard to take normal-sized steps. Lucille turned heads.

She was also smart. She took a job as a stenographic secretary after graduating from high school, working for the Atlanta Paper Mills Company and then the regional office of Swift Meats. Clearly, Lucille was a catch, but poor Leo didn't have any game. So even after seeing each other for months, he still needed something very obvious to get the hint that she was head over heels for him. Luckily, Lucille cut out a bright red construction paper Valentine heart and wrote, Leo in the middle. And that did the trick. In 1909, Leo Frank proposed. He had

only been in Atlanta for 10 months, but he had found the woman who captured his heart, and Lucille accepted. The day after his proposal, Lucille left for a planned trip to visit family in Athens, Georgia. It was a short trip, but of course, Leo and Lucille wrote love letters to each other. In Leo's letters, he opened up about his feelings, saying, your kind words for me are much appreciated and are treasured upon the scrolls of my memory. I am not much on the sentimental letter writing. Read between the lines and see if you can feel the warmth of the writer's feelings for you. Yours for eternal happiness, Leo. With a friend from Cornell as his best man, Leo and Lucille were married in her parents' parlor.

The house was decorated with vases filled with pink carnations, and the bride wore white silk charmeuse covered in lace. She carried a bouquet of white roses and lilies of the valley. Lucille later said, I suppose there are many husbands in the world as good as Leo, and it may be therefore that I am bright future ahead of them. After their marriage, Lucille quit her job to manage their household. Atlanta had a neighborhood primarily occupied by German Jews, so Leo and Lucille fit right in. They lived with Lucille's parents in a part of town that was quiet, full of two-story homes, paved sidewalks, large trees. It wasn't the fanciest part of town, but it was more than respectable,

and many of the prominent Jewish families made their homes there. Lucille was very active in and served as treasurer for the Atlantic Council of Jewish Women. These well-to-do women in their elaborate hats and fur stoles would have been raising money to help young Jewish immigrant women without guardians and finding ways to educate themselves on Judaism through guest speakers and book clubs about Jewish books. Leo was elected president of the Atlanta chapter of B'nai B'rith in 1912. They were on their way to becoming prominent members of Atlanta's upper-class Jewish social circle. way to becoming prominent members of Atlanta's upper-class Jewish social circle. B'nai B'rith, which is Hebrew for Children of the Covenant, is the largest and oldest Jewish service organization in the world. It was founded in New York in 1843, and the organization defends human rights,

promotes intercultural relations, and practices philanthropy and service in their communities and around the world. The B'nai B'rith chapter in Atlanta began in 1870, and by the time Leo was elected its president, they had 500 members. On top of this thriving social life and community service, work was going well for Leo at the pencil factory, despite occasional small clashes with Sig Montag, known as Mr. Sig. Mr. Sig was the majority shareholder of the National Pencil Company and bickered with Leo over the cost of materials and the output of the factory. These conversations often left Leo frazzled and at a loss for words. frazzled and at a loss for words. Leo was sensitive, and even the mildest level of confrontation left him trembling and in need of some quiet time to recover. Leo was a heavy smoker anyway, but would often chain smoke after these talks with Mr. Sig. Despite those unpleasant dealings, the National Pencil Company was doing well under Leo's leadership, in large part due to the cheap

labor it employed, including children. It was cheaper to employ children, after all, so someone paying attention to the bottom line would want to keep costs low. In 1912, there was a bill in the Georgia state legislature that would have raised the minimum work age for children in the state to 14. It was crushed by a collective of factory owners who lobbied against it, arguing that if it passed, it would shut down every mill and factory in the state of Georgia. Leo wasn't one of those who spoke up, sticking to his usual mild-mannered, mind-your-own-business way of doing things. He knew that speaking up for controversial matters put him and other Jewish people more at risk than most. But if things had been different and that bill had actually passed

in 1912, Leo's entire life would have been wildly different. Leo was busy anyway, modernizing the factory and introducing newer machinery. As the years went by, Leo brought in more machines and needed fewer employees. Many of those employees he did keep were children, because their small hands could fit into gaps in the machinery that the average adult hands couldn't. A day in the pencil factory would have been loud, with the humming and clanging of machines at work, women and girls in long skirts, hair held back underneath scarves, and men and boys in their shirt sleeves bustled about some with stained hands from handling graphite, some covered in dust from working with the wood.

We might like to think that the factory smelled like a box of fresh pencils, to think that the factory smelled like a box of fresh pencils, but actually it would have been clouded with the sweetly pungent smells of oil and lacquer. People said the metal they used didn't have a smell so much as a metallic taste. If Leo was conflicted about employing children, he didn't have anyone at the pencil factory to talk to. Everyone there was an employee of his, so he maintained a professional distance. It seems that other than walking the factory floor from time to time, making sure that workers were on task and things were running smoothly, he spent most of his work hours in his office and didn't even know his employees' names. This may seem cold, and certainly progressives and reformers of the time would

have thought so, as they worried about new factories and industries making everything impersonal. Christian reformers began speaking about how things had changed. Just a few decades before, most people got their food and other products from neighbors or people they knew personally. Progressives worried that impersonalizing industry meant that the people making decisions would not know or care what happened to the workers and consumers affected by their decisions. For Leo, not knowing all of his employees would have far different consequences. On Saturday, April 26, 1913, Leo was working in his office at the pencil factory, doing his weekly report as usual. Workers were typically paid at noon on Saturdays.

But this weekend was a holiday, Confederate Memorial Day. Workers had the option of collecting their pay on Friday evening, so Leo had fewer employees than usual in the building on Saturday. He was there to balance accounts in the company's ledgers, interrupted occasionally by factory workers stopping by to pick up their weekly wages. Leo would ask each worker their employee number, walk over to the safe to collect the envelope of coins that they'd earned for the week, and then settle back down to the sounds of his pencil scratching across the paper. On this particular day, though, it's possible Leo couldn't hear his pencil's movements over the crowds and the marching band outside the factory windows celebrating Confederate Memorial Day with a parade. Maybe he gazed out of the office window at the overcast day,

hoping the rain would hold off long enough for him to pick up Lucille and attend the baseball game that afternoon. On that day, not everyone would make it out of the pencil factory alive. would make it out of the pencil factory alive. Join me next time for Episode 2 of The Vigilantes. We'll see you again soon. This show is hosted and executive produced by Sharon McMahon. Our supervising producer is Melanie Buck-Parks. Our audio producer is Jenny Snyder. It's written by Amy Watkin and

Sharon McMahon, and it's researched by Kari Anton, Sharon McMahon, Amy Watkin, Mandy Reed, and Melanie Buck-Parks. If you enjoyed this episode, we'd love for you to leave us a rating or a review, and be sure to hit subscribe so you'll get episode two as soon as it's available. greenhouse gas emissions and protect the environment. Toronto's Blue Bin Recycling Program ensures the majority of the right items are recovered and transformed into new products. Recycling right is important and impactful. Let's work together and make a difference. Because small actions lead to big change. For more tips on recycling, visit toronto.ca slash recycle right.