Abstract

This article examines how pioneer African American filmmaker Oscar Micheaux, in his 1935 film Murder in Harlem, radically altered the traditional understanding of the 1913 murder of Mary Phagan and the ensuant trial, conviction, and lynching of Leo Frank. By rejecting the accepted—racist—preconceptions of the case, and by using the genre of the detective story to retell, and reexamine, this material, Micheaux made a unique and vital contribution to how issues of racism as well as antisemitism affected not only the Leo Frank trial but the literature surrounding it as well.

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