Welcome to the Leo Frank Museum and Gallery at World Famous Flickr.

 

We are the largest Leo Frank research collection in the world (we have more curated artifacts combined than our ambitious competitors at the Leo Frank Research Library located at www.leofrank.info or the Leo Frank papers www.LeoFrank.com or the Leo Frank archive located at www.LeoFrank.org).

 

We have available numerous thousands of images and official documents related to the Saturday, April 26, 1913, rape-murder of Little Mary Phagan (1899-1913) and the ensuing Leo Frank Case (1913-1915). We founded this amazing collection on April 26th of 2011, and updated our showcase to Flickr PRO status on June 1st of 2012. Henceforth the growing number of images in this slideshow have received more than 4 million views in total (that's not a typo) as of June 2024.

 

Special thanks to an anonymous benefactor, this account was renewed to "PRO" status on September 12, 2020, 2022, for two more years, each time. We very much enjoy the popular correspondence and content submissions by our true crime fans from all over the world.

 

As of April 26, 2023, the 12th anniversary of this collection's 2011 founding, we are getting close to reaching and surpassing 7,500 images in total. We never could have dreamed of this much success.

 

On August 17, 2015, the centennial of Leo Frank's lynching, we received a record number of daily visitors to our Gallery Museum in the low 5-figures.

 

Again, we give our very special heart-warming thank you to the anonymous sponsor who donated the funds necessary, so we could maintain the Flickr "Pro" level of the account for another 2-years, until 2024! It means a lot to us that people appreciate our work. We also thank the vibrant community of Frank-Phagan case students who have provided physical artifacts and lively communication to help keep our work dynamic. We love our visitors who have expressed opinions from both sides of the case, and encourage that continued dialogue. We welcome people on both sides of the aisle to keep the conversation going.

 

We receive between 500 to 1000 views on average every single day, but eyeball traffic usually spikes 10-fold whenever the case is brought up in the news media networks. We rely heavily on the correspondence, and collaboration of our fans and students of the case, who have provided upward of 57% of the items in this amazing collection. The largest source of international viewership over the years has come from theatre fans of the Leo Frank Broadway musical named, "Parade" and also thespians performing in this stage production who seek to learn more about the characters they are portraying. We have become the number one source in the world for information about the history of this criminal affair.

 

Our mission is to provide a platform of healing and understanding between the partisans on both sides of the bar. This true crime "cold case" has been anything but cold and refuses to gather dust since 1913.

 

We give you our best regards, from the multicultural staff of the Leo Frank Case Museum and Gallery.

 

Thank you for visiting, Curator of the Leo Frank Museum and Gallery at FLICKR.

 

About Leo Frank:

 

My name is Leo Max Frank, I was born in Cuero, Texas, on April 17, 1884, to Rachel Jacobs and Rudolph Frank. During the summer of 1884, around the middle of July, my parents moved our family back to my mom's hometown of Brooklyn, NY, where I grew up. I went to NYC public schools and the Pratt Institute during my highschool years (1888 to 1902). I matriculated into Ivy League Cornell University at Ithaca, NY, in the fall of 1902, and majored in Mechanical Engineering. During my tenure at college, I played for the Cornell tennis squad and basketball team. My hobbies were amateur landscape photography, chess, and I very much enjoyed being active in college social life. I was also on the school debate team (rising to the rank of vice president and coach) and in the engineering club. Between my Junior and Senior year of college, in the summer of 1905, I went to Europe on a sojourn with my uncle Moses Frank (My dad's older brother by some 3-years). On the summer solstice in June of 1906, I graduated from Cornell University with a bachelor's of science degree, working thereafter, on and off, at various engineering jobs, until my Uncle Moses invited me down to Atlanta in October of 1907 and proposed I operate a new manufacturing plant making writing implements, called, The National Pencil Company (NPCo).

 

My clever uncle Moses (Moe) made his fortune in cotton oil and cotton speculation, and wagered a considerable sum of money as an angel investor into the NPCo., becoming a major shareholder. I seized the opportunity for this exciting new career presented by my father's big brother, and then traveled by a coal-powered steamliner to the German Empire where I became an apprentice in machine work and maintenance. I studied pencil manufacturing at Ebert Faber in Bavaria during a 9-month apprenticeship successfully becoming a journeyman.

 

Upon returning to Ellis Island, NYC in August of 1908, I visited my family for a short time and then traveled south by train from Penn Station in Manhattan to Atlanta's terminal station in Northern Georgia and began work at the National Pencil Company, August 10, 1908.

 

In September of 1908, I was promoted to superintendent and by 1913 given a compensation package of $150 a month, an upper-middle-class wage at the time. To put things into perspective, the child laborers at my factory working 6 days a week for 55 hours, earned $4 every 7-day cycle, Thursday-to-Thursday, adults typically earned about $6 to $10 a week. In 1913, before the federal reserve was created, a fresh loaf of bread, hot out of the baker's oven cost about 2 cents, a tall beer was 5 to 10 cents (depending on the saloon), and a shot of whiskey cost 3 cents. A brand new Ford Model-T cost about $1000. Vacant half-acre to one-acre lots of land at the perimeter of Atlanta cost between $250 to $500. A luxury suite at the Piedmont hotel cost about $4 - $5 a night, compared to a normal room costing about $1-$2 a night. A hand-sewn finely tailored Italian silk suit often worn by Atlanta's elite attorneys costed between $25 and $35 at the time of my trial.

 

In 1910, I married a plump, classy, and sassy local Atlanta girl, a well-bred Jewess named Lucille Selig of blue-blooded Southern patrician stock. She was from a prominent Jewish family that had founded the first Synagogue in Atlanta two generations prior (from her Maternal lineage via Levi Cohen). Rabbi Marx officiated the wedding at 68 East Georgia Avenue, the Selig family's rental home. That residence no longer exists, it is now an overpass. The December 1st, 1910, Atlanta Journal's society page section, described the wedding ceremony in details.

 

In 1912, I was elected B'nai B'rith president of the Atlanta Gate City Lodge #144, which had some 500-odd members from the most prominent Jewish families in Georgia. I was very active in Jewish social life and a rising star in Atlanta's upper crust. In 1913, after 5 years of dedication, I was at the top of my career as General Superintendent of the National Pencil Company and a minor shareholder. I received $100 a month as a dividend, combined with my salary I was taking in $250 a month, a six-figure income by 2013 standards.

 

I was arrested on Tuesday morning, April 29, 1913, under suspicion for sexually-assaulting and strangling one of my factory employees, 13-year-old, Little Mary Anne Phagan (1899 - 1913), it was the last day of my freedom as a civilian. I was indicted on Saturday, May 24, 1913, for her molestation-murder. In the late summer days of 1913, after the longest and most expensive trial in Southern history (July 28 to August 21, 1913), I was convicted on August 25, 1913, and sentenced to hang on August 26, 1913, by the presiding judge Leonard Strickland Roan, with the scheduled date of execution established as October 10th, 1913. On appeal of the trial outcome, the capital punishment was stayed and postponed for later dates.

 

I was re-sentenced to hang several more times, after stays of execution during the appeals of my case from August 17, 1913, till April 19th, 1915 when my Supreme Court appeal was denied. One of the days I was rescheduled to hang was April 17th, 1914, my 30th birthday (by Judge Benjamin H. Hill on March 7th or 9th, 1914).

 

After two years of failed appeals, the Governor of Georgia, John "Jack" Slaton, commuted my death sentence to life in prison on June 21, 1915 (Governor Slaton was a law partner of my trial attorney, Luther Z. Rosser and it outraged the citizenry over the conflict of interest and gross violation of trust). For my safety, I was relocated on June 22nd, 1915, to the middle of the state at the Milledgeville penitentiary, founded in 1911.

 

One month later on July 17th, 1915, a fellow inmate, also convicted for murder, shanked me while I was sleeping, slitting the left side of my throat with a 7-inch-long butcher knife. I barely survived the attempted murder, only because a fellow inmate doctor saved my life (he was convicted of murdering his girlfriend's husband in a love triangle gone sideways.)

 

On August 16, 1915, less than two months after my commutation by former Governor John Marshall Slaton, I was kidnapped from the Milledgeville, GA, prison, driven 125 miles to Marietta and lynched from a mature oak tree at former Sheriff William J. Frey's farm. The men who hanged me were not a mob of alcohol besotted yahoos in a fevered rage, but calmly by the leading members of Atlanta and Marietta society, a former Governor, senators, judges, and other high ranking officials.

 

Seven-decades after my death In 1986 (Special thanks to ADL of B'nai B'rith, Atlanta Jewish Federation, and American Jewish Committee, Dale Schwartz and Charles Wittenstein), I was issued a hotly contested posthumous pardon (one former Superior Court Judge said giving dead people Pardons is not legal or constitutional) but it was without exoneration for the Phagan molestation-garroting. Thus, I was not officially absolved of the murder (In other words, I was not officially cleared of the crime), but, hey, at least I got the right to vote back (I voted by the way in November 2020), run for Governor, and own a gun again, 71 years after I was lynched!

 

People have been misrepresenting my pardon as having exculpated me of all charges, that is, however, fake news, I am still considered guilty, that is, officially in the eyes of the law by the State of Georgia. A new Atlanta Conviction Integrity Unit (CIU) was created by Atlanta District Attorney Paul Howard and Former Governor of Georgia, Roy Barnes, and it is convening to get my conviction set aside. The CIU was founded on April 26, 2019, the anniversary of Mary Phagan's death, and the unspoken undercurrent of this tribunal is that I will be cleared, though some claim it will be based on fabricated evidence.

 

I am buried at the Mount Carmel Cemetery in Glendale, Queens, New York City, New York. Sadly, my wife, Lucille Selig, chose not to be buried next to me (she requested to be cremated in her last will and testament, 1954), even though a grave was reserved for her at the left of my own. My wife's ashes were buried between the headstones of her parents in 1964, some 7-years after she passed away on April 23, 1957.

 

Please closely examine the 7,000+ images, photos, documents, visuals, sketches, and other media pertaining to my life and the years beyond. This museum quality collection has been uploaded here at Flickr.com since 2011. Please also read the analysis provided for each item, written by hundreds of different people. I strongly encourage you to download these items and use them in your own research efforts where ever needed. You have my permission to re-post anything you want which is no longer copyrighted (pre-1950 stuff).

 

Sincerely,

 

Leo Max Frank (1884-1915)