Leo Frank and the Parade of Horribles

In the languid Deep South in the year 1913, an energetically nervous, former Brooklyn Jew, Leo Frank, skipped out on the Confederate Memorial Day Parade and went to work at the pencil factory he managed, instead. Among Atlantans, a mere 50 years after the War of Northern Aggression, even relocated Yankees were expected to mark the solemn day with respect.

Leo Frank, however, was no son of the Antebellum South. He scoffed at the tarnished Confederate cause and didn’t see the point of a parade memorializing a lost war. In Georgia, he was very much a gefilte fish out of water.

Frank’s absence from the parade would prove fatal. He was falsely accused of murdering and sexually assaulting one of his female employees, a 13-year-old child. (Evidence suggested that the crime was actually committed by a Black janitor.)

Convicted by a jury comprised entirely of southern whites who were very much not his peers, Frank pursued his appeals in both state and federal courts to no avail. Even the Supreme Court turned him down. (Incongruously, the case is still under review.)

The agrarian South was receiving its comeuppance against the industrial North—but with an improbable strawman: a slight New York Jew who studied engineering at Cornell and came to represent yet another indignity and upheaval to the southern way of life.

There was but one unexpected act of divine providence in Frank’s favor. All of America was watching, observing from a distance Jim Crow-justice being applied to a Jew. Petitions were signed, and calls for a new trial came from all corners of the country—even from the notorious antisemite, Henry Ford, himself.

Faced with national scrutiny and familiar northern meddling, Georgia’s governor commuted Frank’s death sentence. The locals were none too pleased, however. Informal, extrajudicial lynch laws were long in existence, for this very purpose: enabling angry mobs to sidestep the rule of law and take justice into their own hands. A “Vigilance Committee” of prominent Georgians (rednecks can be found in all professions) seized Frank from his jail cell and hanged him from a tree.

Improbable as it may sound, this tragic tale has been adapted into a thoughtfully entertaining and fortuitously timely Broadway musical, “Parade,” starring Ben Platt as Leo Frank, currently playing to sold-out audiences and well-deserved critical acclaim.

Given these harrowing true events, with its lingering Civil War legacy, bitter southern resentments, and shocking antisemitic implications, it is a wonder the story is not better known. (Hollywood took a stab in 1937 with “They Won’t Forget.” Jack Lemmon headlined a two-part TV miniseries in 1988.)

“Parade” uncovers many layers of the grim tale—the shady politics and legal failure—in two acts with pathos and wit, succeeding as an American tragedy set to music. Indeed, the production fills the stage like a Southern opera—the other side of the street from George Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess”—a Grand Guignol spectacle with the unflinching ambition to borrow from even the austere shadows of minstrel and vaudeville.

Projected onto the stage’s backdrop are actual photographs and frontpage newspaper headlines that serve as a relentless carousel of poisonous, crowd-whipping propaganda. With “Driving Miss Daisy’s” Alfred Uhry responsible for the book, and with music and lyrics supplied by Jason Robert Brown, “Parade” was first mounted nearly 25 years ago, but to far less fanfare (although both Uhry and Brown received Tony Awards).

That was a different moment in America—pre-9/11, pre-War on Terror, pre-Great Recession, pre-COVID. Today, in the aftermath of the George Floyd killing and with hate crimes against Jews dispelling the woke myth of an all-encompassing white privilege, the consequences of violent prejudice and appalling injustice is not confined to any one region, or lost on anyone paying attention.

To prove the point, on “Parade’s” opening night of previews, neo-Nazis protested outside the theater. So much for New York being a Jewish town and Broadway theater a singular Jewish avocation. A century and a decade later, Leo Frank was being denied exoneration, all over again.

At the time of Frank’s trial, the Dreyfus Affair in France—the zayde of all blood-libelous show trials—was freshly on the mind of world Jewry. You know you’re the world’s punching bag when both Paris and Atlanta, during roughly the same time period, yet separated by an ocean of regional and cultural differences—and a large body of water, too—played host to trumped-up charges and rigged outcomes against two very different Jews.

The streets of each city pulsated with antisemitic fervor, the public spectacle of local citizens mocking the fate of two sacrificial Jews conjoined by one immutable, tribal trait.

Jew-hatred is such Manna from the Universe—easily adaptable, arising everywhere, transcending all differences, even the clashing dialects of France’s snooty language and America’s southern drawl.

What happened to Leo Frank was an alarming, although perhaps unsurprising, wake-up call: the Land of Dixie, et tu, might be too treacherous for Jews. Before the lynching, it was difficult to know.

For decades southern Jewry practiced their faith like obedient Episcopalians. Soon after the Leo Frank verdict, half of Georgia’s 3,000 Jews left the state altogether. The Great Migration of southern Blacks to the urban North, apparently, was replicated by a much smaller Jewish exodus.

Leo Frank’s lynching can be credited with inspiring two distinct Jewish movements: the instantaneous creation of the Anti-Defamation League; a half century later, an army of Jewish northerners, linked by the symbolic evil of a noose, joined Martin Luther King’s crusade to bring civil rights to the South.

“Parade,” set in King’s hometown, a city that was considered progressive for its day, gives audiences a glimpse into the creepy antisemitic canards that were inveighed against Frank—southern style. A prim modest man of moral rectitude, he was accused of lascivious behavior and sexual perversion. They prejudged him on account of his habitual handwringing. Blamed him for having bulging eyes. Jewish money from a cabal of scheming financiers was said to be behind his defense.

These provincial Georgians didn’t succumb to the superstitions of Jews with horns and stripes. They didn’t have to. Frank was already perceived as the perfectly demonized southern stand-in for Shakespeare’s Shylock and Dickens’ Fagin.

And they showed him the ultimate in southern hospitality by treating him like yet another variety of “Strange Fruit” hanging from a blood-soaked tree.

Thane Rosenbaum is a novelist, essayist, law professor and Distinguished University Professor at Touro University, where he directs the Forum on Life, Culture & Society. He is the legal analyst for CBS News Radio. His most recent book is titled “Saving Free Speech … From Itself.”