The Gathering Storm: Leo Frank June-July 1913
James Dorsey certainly understood that he was taking an enormous gamble by relying on Jim Conley’s testimony. So did Luther Rosser, Frank’s defense attorney. He argued that a slight, bespectacled white man was unlikely to perpetrate a brutal sexual murder many white Southerners would associate with Negroes—particularly Negroes like Jim Conley. They portrayed Conley not just as a drunk and a habitual liar but as a violent sexual predator. Rosser assumed those old Southern prejudices were too deeply rooted for Dorsey to overcome.
It wasn’t a foolish strategy. Most white Southerners in 1913 would be inclined to take the word of a white man over a black man. Conley was not an educated preacher, journalist, or member of Atlanta’s small but growing Black middle class. He fit many of the South’s most enduring racist stereotypes—drunk, shiftless, in debt, and untrustworthy. Conley was also tied to Phagan’s murder by notes he acknowledged writing. And he was Dorsey’s principal witness against a respected and respectable white man.
The Leo Frank Case: June-July 1913
