This film vividly brings to life one of the most fascinating criminal cases in American history: the 1913 murder of a child laborer, Mary Phagan, and the trial and lynching of Leo Frank, the Jewish factory supervisor accused of her murder. Set against the backdrop of an American South struggling to shed its legacy of bigotry and xenophobia, the film is both a first-rate murder mystery and a compelling look at racial, religious, regional and class prejudices in the early years of the 20th Century. The film illuminates the scandalous trial and its shocking aftermath with dramatic sequences created verbatim from transcripts, documents and letters. Rare historic images and thought-provoking interviews provide insight into this captivating episode that continues to resonate powerfully today.
> The southerners would have preferred to blame it on the black guy.
A person of ordinary intelligence and perception could see how wrong that statement was. First of all, Southerners would never want to believe that a "black man" would have the temerity to abuse and murder an innocent white girl of 13 years old.
Southern whites would never accept the blood of a black man as atonement for the murder. Only the blood of somebody more prominent and important -- yet different -- would suffice.
yabits 5 months ago
exactly blah blah blah Leo Frank did it, but the propagandist Ben Loeterman spins the case
vfuturist 8 months ago
Blah blah blah. Frank did it. He was convicted fair & square. Frank's attorney tried to pass it off on Jim Conley - didn't work. It would have been easy to blame it on the black guy. The southerners would have preferred to blame it on the black guy. But the black guy didn't do it and the evidence proved it. Frank did it, and was convicted.
bammbamm12 9 months ago