C.W. "Bub" Dupre and Mayor Herbert Clay headed to Atlanta.

Eugene Herbert Clay (aka "Herbert Clay") was the son of US Senator Alexander Stephens Clay; older brother of four-star General Lucius D. Clay (who served as Allied High Commissioner of Germany from 1945-1949); mayor of Marietta (1910-1911) and solicitor general (i.e. District Attorney) of the Blue Ridge judicial circuit (1913-18).

Most importantly, however, Herbert Clay was the mastermind and most prominent ringleader of the lynch mob that carried out the infamous 1915 anti-Semitic lynching of Leo Frank.

Frank was a Jewish-American factory superintendent who had been convicted of allegedly raping and murdering one of his adolescent, factory-worker girls, Mary Phagan.

Clay organized a group of prominent men into the KKK-like group, the "Knights of Mary Phagan", which openly planned to kidnap Frank from prison and lynch him. They recruited men with the necessary skills for a total of 28, including themselves; an electrician was to cut the prison wires, car mechanics were to keep the cars running, and there was a locksmith, a telephone man, a medic, a hangman, and a lay preacher. The ringleaders were well known locally, but were not named publicly until June 2000, when a local librarian posted a list on the Web, based on information compiled by Mary Phagan's great-niece Mary Phagan Kean (b. 1953).

The list included a total of 28 men, including Joseph Mackey Brown, former governor of Georgia, Eugene Herbert Clay, former mayor of Marietta and later president of the Georgia Senate, E. P. Dobbs, mayor of Marietta at the time, Moultrie McKinney Sessions, lawyer and banker, part of the Marietta delegation at Governor Slaton's clemency hearing, several current and former Cobb County sheriffs, George Exie Daniell, a longtime Marietta jewelry store owner and original KKK member, and other individuals of various professions. In his capacity as District Attorney, Clay should have prosecuted the lynchers of Frank, a bitter irony, as he himself was the mastermind of the lynch mob.

Frank's murder conviction, and extrajudicial hanging by the lynch mob drew attention to questions of anti-Semitism in the United States. After Frank's lynching, around half of Georgia's 3,000 Jews fled the state in terror.

On November 25, 1915, 3 months after the lynching, 33 members of the "Knights of Mary Phagan" burned a gigantic cross on top of Stone Mountain, inaugurating a revival of the Ku Klux Klan which had been banned in Georgia in 1869. The group was led by a new Imperial Wizard, Col. William J. Simmons, and attended by 15 charter members and a few aging survivors of the original Klan. Among them many prominent, Marietta and Georgia politicians, business and community leaders.

He was subsequently elected to the Georgia State Senate and served as its president in the years 1921-1922; he was elected to the Georgia House of Representatives the following year but died in an Atlanta hotel, a few days before the opening of the 1923 session.



Longtime Frank researcher and author, Steve Oney, tells us that Clay's personal life "was a thoroughgoing scandal and had been since boyhood." In 1901, while a UGA student, he wandered the streets of Athens one night, firing pistol shots into the air, and as a result was expelled from the university. He was found dead at the age of 41 in an Atlanta hotel room on June 22, 1923. There are several different a accounts of how he died. According to a longtime Cobb County Superior Court judge, Luther Hames, "Clay was killed when a whore hit him over the head with a liquor bottle."

In 1982, Alonzo Mann, who had been Frank's office boy for three weeks at the time of Phagan's murder, told a journalist for the Tennessean newspaper, nearly 69 years after the trial ended, that he had seen Jim Conley alone shortly after noon in the factory carrying Phagan's body through the lobby toward the ladder descending to the basement. This contradicted Conley's testimony that he moved Phagan's dead body to the basement by the elevator. Mann swore in an affidavit in the 1980s that Conley had threatened to kill him if he reported what he had seen. At the time of the events Mann was aged 14. After telling his family what he had seen, his parents made him swear not to tell anyone else. Mann explained that his statement was made in an effort to die in peace. He passed a lie detector test, and died three years later in March 1985, at the age of 86. Conway had already died in 1962.

Through the work of the Anti-Defamation League, in 1986, without addressing his guilt or innocence since the records were missing, lost or destroyed, the state of Georgia pardoned Leo Frank posthumously, after an elderly eyewitness to the crime came forward to implicate another man who had been suspected at the time.

In 2000, a list of 26 of the known lynch mob members, broken down into planners (including Clay), field commanders and foot-soldiers, was compiled and published by several renowned Frank researchers. Although it is by no means yet complete - there may have been up to 40 who methodically conspired in the Frank kidnapping and lynching, including those at the very highest levels of local and state government. This article by Dr. Donald E. Wilkes Jr. Univ. of Georgia, Professor of Law Emeritus contains the list:
http://flagpole.com/news/news-features/2004/05/05/steve-oney-s-list-of-the-leo-frank-lynchers

Sadly, none of the organizers or members of the lynch mob were ever indicted or brought to justice, and it would be over a half a century after their deaths before any of them would be publically "unhooded," shamed and relegated to their nefarious place in history.

Herbert Eugene Clay, Senior, age 10 ~ Atlanta, 1891. Son of Sara Frances White Clay and U.S. Senator, Alexander Stephens Clay.

Mayor of Marietta, 1910-1911, Solicitor General, 1913-1918 and President of the Georgia Senate, 1921-1923.

Herbert, Lex and Frank Clay