A century after lynching, town still wrestles over history

(AP) — Down past the Big Chicken, the 56-foot-high, steel-beaked beacon of extra crispy that may be this town's most prized landmark, and just across from Fast Eddie Auto Sales, the wedge of dirt hard by Interstate 75 is notable only for its lack of notability.

[...] when Rabbi Steven Lebow pulls up there, he leaves the engine running and door open.

[...] with transportation crews readying to build over the place where Marietta's leading citizens lynched a Jewish factory superintendent named Leo Frank on an August morning a century ago, Lebow talks only of what's worth preserving.

The case, charged with race, religion, sex and class, exploded in a national media frenzy, cementing a North-South divide and exposing the resentments of economic upheaval.

The case established the Anti-Defamation League as the country's most outspoken opponent of anti-Semitism, while helping fuel rebirth of what had been a dormant Ku Klux Klan, months after the lynching.

[...] ADL lawyers pressed officials to posthumously pardon Frank in the 1980s, the case was hushed in Atlanta's synagogues, the homes of Old Marietta, and among Phagan's descendants.

Soon After Dan Cox turned an abandoned Civil War-era hotel off the downtown square into the Marietta Museum of History more than two decades ago, he knocked on the door of a 96-year-old resident.

In 1913, Phagan, her hair in bows, stopped to collect her pay from the factory, where she ran a machine that inserted rubber erasers into pencils.

[...] on August 16, Lebow will lead a memorial service at which he and some current and former Georgia Supreme Court justices plan to call on state lawmakers to declare Frank's exoneration.

The effort was prompted by the words of Alonzo Mann, the office boy for Frank, who, 69 years after Phagan's murder, told the Nashville Tennessean he'd caught Conley with the girl's body, but stayed silent because he was threatened with death.

[...] in 1986, officials granted a pardon, recognizing the state's failure to protect Frank, "without attempting to address the question of guilt or innocence."

[...] yet, as the 100th anniversary of Frank's death approaches, the recent mass shooting at a historic black church in Charleston, S.C., is on his mind.

When Roy Barnes came home after losing re-election as Georgia's governor, he renovated an abandoned church in downtown Marietta as a law office, commissioning a huge stained glass window of Lady Justice, lit up at night.

Barnes, who is 67 and was raised on a Cobb County farm, recalls the hush around Frank's name when he was a boy, and how, as a legislator, he borrowed books on the case from the state library to pass time when debate dragged.

The Frank story needs to be talked about, "to remind people here that we're only one step away from mob rule, even from the leaders in our community, and we need to be told that and study so that we never let that happen again," he says.

Just off a gravel road tucked into North Georgia's hills, Mary Phagan Kean ushers a visitor into a moss-green room filled with scrapbooks, family photos and files detailing the life and death of a 13-year-old girl a century ago.

When a historic marker was proposed for Phagan's grave, she asked for wording making clear the pardon was based on the state's failure to protect him, "not Frank's innocence."

Lebow, who recently posted a picture of Frank on Facebook, followed soon after by a photo of Cobb County's first Jewish same-sex wedding, says acknowledging mistakes of history is the only route toward a "newer South."