Hello and welcome to this day in esoteric political history from radiotopia.

My name is Jody Avrogan.

This day, August 17, 1915, a mob abducted and lynched a man named Leo Frank near Marietta, Georgia, just outside of Atlanta.

Leo Frank was Jewish and his lynching for a crime that he didn't commit to most historians

agree we'll get into some of the specifics there but this lynching was part of a rising

wave of anti-Semitism in the south and that rising wave was part of a larger resurgence of bigoted mob violence in the first few decades of the 20th century

much of it driven by the reappearance of the Clu Klux Klan.

We of course think of the Klan, rightly so, as a group that terrorized black Americans, but in many ways

it was the lynching of Leo Frank that signaled and galvanized the reappearance of the KKK. So a really interesting wrinkle and some context here.

So here to discuss Leo Frank, Jim Crow, anti-Semitism, the resurgence of the clan and more are as always

Nicole Hammer of Columbia and Kelly Carter Jackson of Wellesley. Hello there.

Hello Jody. Hey there. So the twists and turns of the Frank case are very complicated and we will try and do our best to get through them and lay out that.

But I do want to take a step back, Kelly, and just ask about, I mentioned, you know, that this is part of a story of the

resurgence of the clans so I suppose when we talk about the resurgence of the clan we should

talk about in the era before this what is the what is the clan you know what does it have to

resurge from so the the clan really gets its genesis during reconstruction so a

lot of this is the political gains that black people made during reconstruction.

So if you think of the end of the Civil War from about 1865 till about 1877, the

clan really becomes an organization created to institute white supremacy and terrorism against African Americans who were pushing for political and social

infranchisement.

And they sort of fall to the wayside

by the late 19th century

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