GEORGIA ON OUR MIND

The musical "Parade" revisits the charged trial of Leo Frank.

- HELEN SHAW

How well do modern theatregoers seeing “Parade,” at the Bernard B. Jacobs, know the story of Leo Frank? It’s been more than a century since Frank, the Jewish superintendent of an Atlanta pencil factory, was accused of the sexual assault and murder of thirteen-year-old Mary Phagan, railroaded into a guilty verdict, tantalized with the possibility of an appeal, then kidnapped from prison and lynched in Marietta, Georgia. At the time, the overt display of Southern antisemitism—crowds outside the courthouse where he was tried screamed “Hang the Jew!”—shocked the country. Some rose up against it: Frank’s ordeal spurred the formation of the Anti-Defamation League, for example. But it also helped fuel the revival of the Ku Klux Klan. Some of the men who burned a cross on Stone Mountain in 1915 were the so-called Knights of Mary Phagan, who had been in Marietta only a few months earlier, under an oak tree.