August 17, 2015, marked the 100th anniversary of the lynching of Leo Frank, an event that shaped the development of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and spurred the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK).
Frank, a Jew living in Georgia, was a factory superintendent who was convicted―by almost all modern accounts wrongly―of sexually assaulting and murdering Mary Phagan, a 13-year-old girl, in 1913. His trial was fraught with specious testimony and circumstantial evidence, yet he was still convicted and sentenced to death. His sentence was later commuted to life in prison, which spurred a mob (that included local elected officials) to break into the prison in which he was being held and to lynch him in Phagan’s hometown.
Frank’s saga was national news, and the fallout from his lynching influenced the early years of the ADL, which had been founded in 1913 and eventually won Frank a posthumous pardon. It also gave rise to the renewal of the KKK, which was re-formed out of a hate group that was named after the murdered girl.