It should have been a fine, frivolous Saturday for Lucille Selig Frank in the spring of 1913.
A vivacious socialite, she went to an opera matinee after wheedling her husband, Leo, to accompany her. He was a dutiful workaholic, however, so he retired to his desk at the National Pencil Company to complete a business report instead. There, he crossed paths with Mary Phagan, a 14-year-old employee, whose auburn-haired beauty was turning heads around the factory. From this point on, the story varies according to the narrator.
Leo Frank was the last known person to see the girl alive. Her brutalized body was found in the building later that day. Several men, possessed of means and opportunity, were suspected of the crime, but Frank, a Jewish intellectual from New York with nervous mannerisms, was convicted after a sensational trial. Most historians believe he was innocent. While he was held in custody, a mob of prominent community leaders, in a paroxysm of xenophobia, extracted him and lynched him from a tree in Marietta, where Phagan was from.
That basic summary of events is necessary for newcomers to understand I Am a Georgia Girl: The Life of Lucille Selig Frank, 1888-1957 (Mercer University Press, 2025), the latest work by Atlanta author Ann Hite. But most Southerners — and all Jews — know something of the sorrowful saga, which has been exhaustively rehashed in song and story. Parade, a Tony-winning musical, explores the ugly prejudice at issue, and Steve Oney’s sprawling, elegant masterpiece, And the Dead Shall Rise, addresses the case in granular detail. (Oney graciously allowed Hite to sift through his notes in addition to her other research.)
“It’s a story with a lot of layers that still captivates people,” Hite said. “And for me, it feels very personal.”
Hite’s grandmother was one of many children taken to view the lynching at the age of 6. “It was a circus atmosphere, with people having picnics with watermelon and Coca-Cola and people snapping photos for postcards,” Hite recalled, shaking her head. “My granny told me all about this when I was 10, and the case has fascinated me ever since.”
And near the center of the action was a compelling, enigmatic figure whose voice had not fully been heard: Frank’s wife Lucille.
“Leo had three strikes against him — the most important being that he was a Yankee and educated, third that he was Jewish,” Hite said. “It was Lucille who was sounding the alarm and getting in everybody’s face, saying that antisemitism was the cause of the verdict.”
The young wife mounted a petition campaign for her husband’s innocence, which spread from New York to Chicago and flooded the governor’s office with pleas for a pardon.
“She was a very strong, very outspoken woman,” Hite said. “The news media often painted her as crazy or a hysteric, but that was normal for women in that era. Who wouldn’t have PTSD and emotional fluctuations going through all that? The more I learned about her, the more I wanted to honor her memory.”
Hite, 67, lives in Marietta and has written six historical novels and two nonfiction books. I’m a Georgia Girl is a dense, Southern-inflected volume — like a good pound cake — that chronicles her subject’s happy and promising early life as well as the somber silence that descended later. Frank’s marriage lasted only three-and-a-half years. She never remarried, and until her death signed her name “Mrs. Leo Frank.” She was letting people know he was not erased,” Hite said.
“In her fiction, Ann Hite does not advertise things in advance, but they come naturally, organically in the story,” said Hite’s editor, Marc Jolley. “This could be taken as a given, but many writers are not able to let stories develop on their own.”
The title comes from Lucille Selig Frank’s last public statement about the execution — her poignant way of saying, “We are one of you — not exotic interlopers.”
“Ann Hite’s soulful work always captures stories just before they can recede into the shadows,” said Atlanta novelist Kimberly Brock. “She knows her ghosts. She stays with them on the page, not by the use of flimsy nostalgia but with indelible truths of humanity and courage. And with every word of her latest, I imagine a conversation, two heads together in the early hours before dawn, one Georgia girl to another, both in fervent agreement that this work doesn’t ask us to remember — it asks us to change.”
However, things haven’t changed as much as Hite would like. “When I first announced this project on Facebook, I suddenly noticed all of these people unfriending me. Well, it turned out my husband is related to the Phagans. And they’re very much like: You’re either in Mary’s camp or Leo’s camp. You can’t be in between. I wanted to write about the in between.”
Even today, in the fever swamp of social media, there exists a virulently antisemitic phenomenon of “Leo Frank truthers,” who insist he deserved his fate. “And a couple of years ago, Jewish families in Fulton County awoke to find these fliers on their lawn with Leo’s face on them,” Hite said. “Sadly, this story of an old murder and an old hanging remains relevant and topical.”
As a gesture of appreciation, her subject’s nephew gave Hite the writing desk once used by his long-suffering aunt. “Because I’m Appalachian at heart and believe in signs, I took that as a sign that Lucille approved of my project,” Hite said.
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Candice Dyer’s work has appeared in magazines such as Atlanta, Garden & Gun, Men’s Journal and Country Living. She is the author of Street Singers, Soul Shakers, Rebels with a Cause: Music from Macon.
