The Leo Frank Case Quotes

“In retrospect it is difficult to see how the outcome of the trial could have been different. As Edmund M. Morgan, co-author of 'The Legacy of Sacco and Vanzetti,' observed, 'every experienced judge and every experienced lawyer know [that] it is almost impossible to secure a verdict which runs counter to the settled convictions of the community.' And in the South, where, according to Ellen Glasgow, the Virginia novelist, the people never developed the habit of independent thought - 'there was, indeed, no need for thinking when everybody thought alike, or, rather, when to think differently meant to be ostracized' - dire social and economic consequences awaited those jurors who would forget tradition and ignore their fellow citizens' attitudes toward Leo Frank.”
― Leonard Dinnerstein, The Leo Frank Case

“Despite indications of affection, a strong Anti-Semitic bias remained. In an 1878 campaign speech Senator John T. Morgan of Alabama referred to a candidate as a 'Jew-dog,' and the following year Senator Morgan opposed the appointment of a postmaster in Montgomery because he had been endorsed 'by a parcel of Jews.' In Nashville, Tennessee, in 1878, Christian mothers threatened to withdraw their children from a private school for girls after two Jews had been accepted. The principal yielded to the pressure and rescinded the enrollments. And in a Rome, Georgia, courtroom in 1873, the plaintiff's attorney declared that one cannot accept the word of a Jew 'even under oath.' Louisiana had anti-Semitic demonstrations in the late 1880s. Then, in 1893, farmers in the Bayou state wrecked Jewish stores in a particularly harsh outburst. That same year Mississippi night riders burned Jewish farmhouses, and a Baltimore minister preached: 'Of all the dirty creatures who have befouled this earth, the Jew is the slimiest.”
― Leonard Dinnerstein, The Leo Frank Case