Black-Jewish Relations on Trial: Leo Frank and Jim Conley in the New South

Preface

PREFACE T his book uses the example of the Leo Frank case to address the central question of Black-Jewish relations: how have African Americans and Jews been paired—as partners or competitors or some blend thereof—within the controlling American racial systemof Black and white? With its pitting of an African American janitor, Jim Conley, against aJewish factory manager, Leo Frank, in a contest to decide who was responsible for the murder of the youngwhite woman Mary Phagan in 1913, the case isa perfect emblem for the erratic and dense history ofJews and African Americans: this history might be condensed in the image of a long and sturdy rope— some tie strong bonds with it, others get hanged. Black-Jewish Relations on Trial attempts to call into question the dominant historical narrative of this relationship. My title is meant to suggestthat the class of behaviors and utterances we call "Black-Jewish relations" might be best understood as coming to light most clearly in the mediumof crisis. This book offers an investigation of the Leo Frank case of 1913-15, in which a Jewish man was tried for the murder of a young white woman who worked for him in an Atlanta factory. This case not only set Frank and Conley against each other but also produced (fora largely horrified public) a vision of New ix x Preface South labor relations created by industrialization.It presents uswith an opportunity to explore one specific "Black-Jewish relation" in all its complexity. The puzzling circumstances of the Frank case (if Frank didn't do it, then Conley musthave) allowus to examine the racial and ethnic hierarchies of 1915.1 Commentators have been puzzled for decades now that Frank waseven charged with this crime,when JimConley was right there in the National Pencil Company factory looking suspicious (a bloody shirt, no alibi, and so on). A new look at the case will call into question those narratives of a shared Black-Jewish history that are organized around the idea of a logically unfolding relationship: in my analysis of the Frank case "multiplicity" (of motivation , causation, and outcome) is introduced as a key term for explaining what goes on inside of the common spaces shared by Jews and African Americans. Frank and Conley were imagined by many to be in poisonously close contact with one another, apparently involved together in activities that marginalized both. Rather than the Utopian possibilities so often presented by "BlackJewish relations," the Frank case promoted the provocative notion that the connection of Frank and Conley functioned mostly to advance illicit (or at least unhealthy) social behaviors. With my analysis of the Leo Frank case 1 hope to demonstrate that this major event cannot be made to fit into anyof the familiar renderings of "Black-Jewishrelations"; in so doing I also want to forswear the (no doubt comforting) practice of narrating Black-Jewishrelations as a simple and coherent set of events. This criminal trial reminds us that important cultural discussions might begin in the courtroom, but they rarely end there. Trialsare part of what James Scott calls "the public transcript"—a script that is endorsed (at least tacitly) by everyone involved, but which at best tells only a partial story about the workings of power (2). To understand fully the lasting cultural importance of the Frank case, we will have to look not only in the trial record but also in the "unofficial" record: the novels, plays, newspaperaccounts, poems, websites, and songs that have—in the eighty-five years since Leo Frank waslynched— attempted to set the record straight. As such, Black-Jewish Relations on Trial will treat the relationship of Jim Conley and Leo Frank as a story that has been a site of struggle for all these years. My own position on Frank's guilt or innocence is not relevant to the aims of this book: I am more interested in Preface xi how the current generation of scholars has come to agree that Frank was innocent than I am in trying to present one more "whodunit" patchwork of the historical record. The aura of complete innocence that now surrounds Leo Frank has made it difficult to move beyond the exculpatory and into the analytical . The influential historian Deborah Dash Moore, for instance, writes about Frank in passing as someone framed "despite lack of evidence and obvious innocence" ("Separate Paths" 285); Leonard Dinnerstein, the historian of record...