Reaction to Lynching
Editorial on the Leo Frank lynching from the Tifton gazette in Tifton, Georgia.
The Northern reaction to Frank’s lynching was immediate and critical of the breakdown of law in Georgia, and at the failure to prosecute the men who were responsible. The San Francisco Bulletin printed:“Georgia is mad with her own virtue, cruel, unreasoning, blood-thirsty, barbarous. She is not civilized. She is not Christian. She is not sane.”
The reaction in Georgia was different. Most white Georgians felt justice had been served.
From the Milledgeville Union-Recorder: “The real truth about the matter is about 90 per cent of the white people of Georgia believed Frank guilty, and believed that under the operation of the law his life was justly, legally, and righteously forfeited.”
But there were also voices of opposition. Many saw the lynching as a manifestation of the intense anti-Semitism in the region exacerbated by Tom Watson’s writings in Watson’s Jeffersonian Magazine and similar publications. New South capitalists and elite Georgia progressives publicly disdained the vigilantism of the lynching, which they saw as a threat to the stability of industrialism and urban growth that they championed. And although African Americans were frustrated by the outburst of sympathy for Frank amidst white apathy to hundreds of African American lynchings, the African American press condemned the lynching as a familiar act of policing racial boundaries because Jews were considered a non-white racial group during this period.
