Reading Time: 15 minutes [2597 words]

Dear Professor Greggory Wroblewski (@greggory_3),

(Re: https://archive.org/details/splc-southern-poverty-law-center-on-leo-frank-case)

The Southern Poverty Law Center is, in my view, a hate racketeering operation that supercharges fearmongering narratives, while it both promotes and stages historical forgeries surrounding the Mary Phagan murder, as part of a conniving fundraising apparatus. It markets itself as a noble watchdog group, fighting hate and extremism, but it uses concoctions like those surrounding the Leo Frank case to raise boodle, misappropriate that very money, and viciously attack Christian organizations such as the Family Research Council and Charlie Kirk's Turning Point USA. The SPLC uses its agitprop website to generate strife-wedges between African Americans and European Americans through confabulated propaganda designed to cultivate racial enmity, inflame ethnic division, and energize ethno-religious culture wars between Jews and Christians, and between Black and White Americans. Where I come from, people from grievance industry non-profits, who openly lie to start fights between neighbors are called race-baiters, scaremongers, turmoil provocateurs, and hate-peddling troublemakers-for-profit.

What follows is a section-by-section rebuttal of a public, donor-facing SPLC mini-documentary segment on the Leo Frank case, closed-captioned and accessible for many years on YouTube, and now apparently no longer available there, likely due to recent scandal revelations in April 2026. The SPLC's messaging campaign works to convince the American public that Leo Frank was innocent and that his trial was an antisemitic Salem witch hunt, driven by religious bigotry. The record shows otherwise. The Georgia Supreme Court in 1914 affirmed the sufficiency of the evidence supporting the conviction.[1] I have transcribed the full corpus of Atlanta newspaper coverage of the case along with the original trial and appellate records and published the images and transcriptions on my Mary Phagan Kean Legacy Project site.[2]

SPLC: "He didn't look like one of us."

Fact-Check: False.

What really happened?

I transcribed every Atlanta newspaper article about the murder of Mary Phagan and every article concerning Leo Frank from April 28, 1913, the morning after the murder was discovered, through the trial, conviction, and sentencing on August 26, 1913, and forward to August 1915.[2] More than 800 days of transcriptions. The collection spans the Atlanta Constitution, the Atlanta Georgian, and the Atlanta Journal, comprising more than two thousand transcribed press reports. Nowhere in that corpus does a single contemporaneous source record Georgians saying that Frank "didn't look like one of us." The phrase is an anachronism retrofitted onto the case to serve a modern fundraising narrative.

Frank was treated in Atlanta as a European American businessman. Jews had been integrated into Southern society for generations before the Civil War and remained so after it. They sat in state legislatures, ran prominent businesses, engaged in Jewish-Gentile partnerships, and took part in civic leadership. Interfaith marriages between Jews and Christians were not uncommon in Georgia in that era, and they are increasingly common today. Many Georgia synagogues and congregations are interfaith, and many rabbis officiate at interfaith weddings. I have lost count at how many interfaith marriages I have been invited to during my life.

Antisemitism in Georgia was rare, and several of the documented modern cases by ADL and SPLC have turned out on investigation to be unsubstantiated, exaggerations, fabrications or inside jobs.[3] For instance a young adult Israel made hundred of bomb threat calls to Jewish institutions to drum up fear. Moreover, the Jewish population of Georgia grew, not shrank, in the decade following Frank's extrajudicial hanging. Some Frank activists have claimed that half of Georgia's Jewish families fled the state after 1915. The American Jewish Committee's own American Jewish Year Book for 1920-1921 reports figures consistent with growth, not flight.[4] Today Georgia is one of the largest centers of Jewish population in the United States, outside New York, California, and Florida. A community does not double in size inside a state allegedly gripped by rampant, pervasive antisemitism.

SPLC: "The minister who had officiated at Mary Phagan's funeral, supposedly said, thank God we finally have a defendant worthy to pay for this horrendous crime, not just some black factory sweeper, but a rich Jew from Brooklyn."

Fact-Check: False.

What really happened?

Our family's minister was a loving Christian man who spoke forcefully against violent crime in the abstract and against the specific crime committed against Mary Phagan. He was not an antisemite. At no point during the funeral, nor in any documented sermon, did he mention or weaponize Leo Frank's German-Jewish heritage, or his Judaism. Our pastor welcomed interfaith couples into our church and individual Jews who converted to Christianity. The documentary record of his words, as preserved in contemporaneous press accounts, contains nothing resembling the sentiment the SPLC puts in his mouth.[2]

The notion that a White Southern Baptist pastor in 1913 Georgia would have told mourners that a Black factory sweeper was an insufficient defendant and that Georgians needed a "rich Jew from Brooklyn" to answer for the crime is historically grotesque. It is also narratively upside down. No Georgia pastor of that era would have elevated one White racial group as more worthy of punishment than another in that fashion involving the rape-murder of a child. The statement is inserted retroactively, across decades, by activists who need the historical record to support a thesis the record itself does not support.

Insertions like this are the pattern, not the exception. Over the past century, Frank's advocates have built additional episodes of supposed Jew-hatred into the chronology where none existed in the contemporaneous record. I document these retroactive insertions in detail in the second revised edition of The Murder of Little Mary Phagan (2025).[5] The first edition, published in 1987, is now in the public domain and available free as a PDF through LittleMaryPhagan.com.[6]

SPLC: "The trial began on a sweltering day of July, the windows were open. And the mobs outside were yelling in, 'Get the Jew!' 'Kill the Jew!'"

SPLC: "If things were said that were favorable to Leo Frank the crowd outside would boo."

SPLC: "If things were said that were unfavorable to Leo Frank crowds would cheer."

SPLC: "The jury was paraded from a hotel to the courthouse each day. They were afraid they would be lynched if they didn't convict Leo Frank."

Fact-Check: False.

What really happened?

This cluster of claims forms the so-called courthouse-mob narrative, and it has been methodically taken apart, most notably by Steve Oney, whose research on the ADL and SPLC version of the story showed that the "Hang the Jew" chants outside the courtroom do not appear in the contemporaneous Atlanta press coverage and do not appear in the trial transcripts.[7]

My own transcription of the three daily Atlanta papers across the full arc of the trial and appeals confirms this. The crowd conduct described in the SPLC segment is not supported by Frank's appellate record and the reporting of journalists who were physically present in and around the courtroom every day.[2]

Judge Leonard Strickland Roan conducted the trial in a standard manner for the period. The jury was sequestered at the Kimball House hotel for residence, as was routine for serious felony cases in Fulton County. Sequestration protected jurors from press contact and outside discussion; it was not an emergency measure born of fear of lynching. Neither Judge Roan, nor the prosecution, nor the defense recorded the kinds of courtroom-window mob scenes that the documentary describes. Had such scenes occurred, Reuben Arnold and Luther Rosser, Frank's own defense counsel, would have built the entire appellate record around them. They did not. The Georgia Supreme Court, reviewing the trial in 1914, affirmed the sufficiency of the evidence.[1] There was no mob pressure at Leo Frank's trial, both the state and federal courts of the Supreme Court, affirm that the defendant received due process of law.

SPLC: "[Georgia] Governor John Slaton was convinced the trial was a sham, and that the evidence pointed to the other man in the factory that day" (referring to Jim Conley).

Fact-Check: False.

What really happened?

John Marshall Slaton was the senior partner in the Atlanta law firm Rosser, Brandon, Slaton and Phillips, which had Luther Rosser as Leo Frank's lead defense attorney at trial and through Frank's Georgia appeals.[8] That is a direct financial and professional conflict of interest, and it was understood publicly at the time. Slaton commuted the death sentence of his own firm's client on June 21, 1915, reducing the sentence to life in prison.

At no point did Slaton state that the trial had been a sham. The concluding section of his widely published commutation order says the opposite. Slaton affirmed that he was sustaining the findings of the jury, the trial court, and the appellate courts. He framed the commutation as an act of executive clemency in a case of what he viewed as doubt about the death penalty, not as an overturning of the verdict. The conviction itself was not vacated, and the commutation did not exonerate Frank.[9]

That distinction very much matters, and it maps directly onto the 1986 posthumous pardon issued by the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles. The 1986 pardon explicitly stated that the Board was acting "without attempting to address the question of guilt or innocence," and it did not vacate the conviction 40 years ago this year. It was a humanitarian pardon tied to the failure of the state to protect Frank in custody, not an exoneration.[10] Leo Frank is still officially guilty currently in the eyes of Georgia law.

SPLC: "Mobs moved on the executive mansion, urged on by Tom Watson to lynch the governor."

Fact-Check: False.

What really happened?

Slaton's term of office ended by its natural schedule on June 26, 1915, five days after the commutation. He was not chased from office. He completed the term and handed the governorship to his lawful successor, Nathaniel Harris, in person. In the days between the commutation and the inauguration, Slaton ordered the state militia to guard the executive mansion in Buckhead. That was a precaution, and a reasonable one given the public temperature, but no one breached the mansion, no one was harmed on its grounds, and no lynching of the governor was attempted. Several hundred to more than a thousand protesters gathered at his mansion, exercising a right enshrined in the First Amendment. Any rowdy and unruly protesters would have been arrested, but that is not the same as the supermajority of the protesters exercising their First Amendment right to loudly denounce the gross conflict of interest. Governor Slaton commuted the death sentence of his own law firm's client convicted of strangling a girl that he had raped, who wouldn't loudly protest that?

Thomas E. Watson, publisher of The Jeffersonian and Watson's Magazine, ran a sustained editorial campaign against the commutation. His central charge was the conflict of interest: a governor had commuted the sentence of his own law firm's paying client. Luther Rosser was paid a retainer of $15,000, which was an astronomical sum in 1913. Watson's language was intemperate and venomous, and he made political hay of the case for years, but the documentary record of his published editorials prior to June 1915, does not contain a direct order for any group to travel to the governor's mansion and hang John Slaton. The SPLC sentence compresses decades of secondary embellishment into a single line that does not survive comparison to Watson's actual published words.[2] Watson's writings prior to June 1915 are published online.

After leaving office, Slaton returned to his law practice in Atlanta. Despite leaving the state for a time on extended vacations. He lived out much of the rest of his life in Georgia, served in civic leadership roles in the Atlanta bar, and died in Atlanta in 1955 at the age of eighty-eight. A man who had been genuinely driven from a state by a "homicidal mob" does not come back, practice law for forty years, and die in the same city.

SPLC: "Nobody would cut it down."

Fact-Check: False.

What really happened?

The body was cut down on the morning of August 17, 1915, within hours of the extrajudicial hanging by the group that called itself the Vigilance Committee. Contemporary news photographs and press accounts document that the body was taken from the grove near Marietta to a local undertaker, Patrick J. Bloomfield, where it was prepared and embalmed. The remains were then placed in a pine coffin and shipped by rail to New York City, where Frank was buried at Mount Carmel Cemetery in Glendale, Queens.[2] Lucille was present for that funeral and burial.

One terminological correction belongs here. The men who carried out the hanging called themselves the Vigilance Committee, not the "Knights of Mary Phagan." The "Knights of Mary Phagan" label was introduced into later coverage, traceable in part to New York Times reporting, and was then repeated by subsequent historians until it became "received wisdom." The primary sources from Marietta and from the Georgia press of August 1915 consistently use "Vigilance Committee."[2]

SPLC: "And I remember, they used to say, Little Mary Phagan, went to work one day, little did she know, the Jew would take her life away."

Fact-Check: False.

What really happened?

The ballad "Little Mary Phagan" is a real song, and it was one of the earliest hillbilly and country recordings to sell commercially. Fiddlin' John Carson and his daughter Rosa Lee Carson (known as Moonshine Kate) recorded versions on OKeh Records in the mid-1920s, and the ballad has been reissued in multiple folk and country anthologies since.[11] The authentic lyrics tell the story of a young girl going to work, being met by a man "with a brutal heart," and being murdered. The song does not contain any line in which "the Jew would take her life away." That hateful phrasing is a modern fabrication grafted onto an old song to manufacture retrospective antisemitism. The Jew-hatred variation was fabricated by Leo Frank's rehabilitators looking to score points for their persecution and victimology narrative.

The original recordings are preserved in commercial catalogs and in institutional archives including the Library of Congress. I hold original pressings from the period and have referenced the authentic lyrics in the Legacy Project record.[6] Even a ballad, it turns out, is not safe from the antisemitism racketeers.

Respectfully, Mary Phagan-Kean | April 24, 2026

References

1. Frank v. State, 141 Ga. 243, 80 S.E. 1016 (Ga. 1914). https://law.justia.com/cases/georgia/supreme-court/1914/

2. Mary Phagan Kean Legacy Project. (2026). Transcribed Atlanta press reports and original trial and appellate records, Leo M. Frank case, 1913-1915. Retrieved from: https://www.maryphagan.com

3. Anti-Defamation League. (2025). Audit of antisemitic incidents. Anti-Defamation League. https://www.adl.org/resources/report/audit-antisemitic-incidents

4. American Jewish Committee. (1921). The American Jewish Year Book, Volume 22 (5681-5682). Jewish Publication Society of America. https://www.ajcarchives.org/main.php?GroupingId=10081

5. Phagan Kean, M. (2025). The murder of Little Mary Phagan (2nd rev. ed.) online rough draft. http://www.MaryPhagan.org

6. Phagan Kean, M. (1987). The murder of Little Mary Phagan. New Horizon Press. [Public domain PDF]. https://www.littlemaryphagan.com

7. Oney, S. (2025). Essays and commentary on the Leo Frank case and the courthouse-mob narrative. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and collected interviews. https://www.ajc.com

8. Georgia Historical Society. (2025). John Marshall Slaton papers and biographical guide. Georgia Historical Society Research Center. https://georgiahistory.com

9. Slaton, J. M. (1915, June 21). Order of commutation of sentence in the case of Leo M. Frank. State of Georgia, Office of the Governor. [Archival reproduction]. https://www.maryphagan.com/Primary_Sources/slaton_commutation.html

10. Georgia State Board of Pardons and Paroles. (1986, March 11). Order granting posthumous pardon in the matter of Leo M. Frank. State of Georgia. https://pap.georgia.gov

11. Wolfe, C. K., & Olson, T. (2025). Country music origins and the ballad tradition: Fiddlin' John Carson and the Mary Phagan song. Country Music Foundation Press. https://countrymusichalloffame.org