Was an innocent man wrongly accused of murder?
On April 26, 1913, thirteen-year-old Mary Phagan planned to meet friends at a parade in Atlanta, Georgia. But first she stopped at the pencil factory where she worked to pick up her paycheck. Mary never left the building alive.
A black watchman found Mary's body brutally beaten and apparently raped. Police arrested the watchman, but they weren't satisfied that he was the killer. Then they paid a visit to Leo Frank, the factory's superintendent, who was both a Northerner and a Jew.
Spurred on by the media frenzy and prejudices of the time, the detectives made Frank their prime suspect, one whose conviction would soothe the city's anger over the death of a young white girl.
The prosecution of Leo Frank was front-page news for two years, and Frank's lynching is still one of the most controversial incidents of the twentieth century. It marks a turning point in the history of racial and religious hatred in America, leading directly to the founding of the Anti-Defamation League and to the rebirth of the modern Ku Klux Klan. Relying on primary source documents and painstaking research, award-winning novelist Elaine Marie Alphin tells the true story of justice undone in America.
Photo Credits:
Leo Frank Photo: © Bettman/Corbis
Mary Phagan Photo: New York Times Company Records, Adolph Ochs Papers, Manuscripts and Archives division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations
Slideshow
Buy the Book
 |
An Unspeakable Crime: The Prosecution and Persecution of Leo Frank ISBN: 978-0-8225-8944-0 List Price: $22.95 Reading Level: Grade 9 |
Buy this book at your local bookstore or online at:
About the Author
Elaine Marie Alphin is an award-winning author of more than twenty books for young people, including The Perfect Shot, which earned a star from School Library Journal and won the ForeWord Magazine Gold Medal for Young Adult Fiction; Picture Perfect, a VOYA Top Shelf Fiction Selection, and Counterfeit Son, winner of the Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Young Adult Mystery. She lives in Bozeman, Montana.
Other Books by Elaine Marie Alphin
