Free Republic

A previously unpublished interview with a Nation of Islam minister has revealed a detailed account of a secret two-hour meeting involving Malcolm X and the Ku Klux Klan that discussed an extraordinary unholy alliance. The conversation on January 28, 1961, detailed in a forthcoming biography of Jeremiah Shabazz, reveals how, on behalf of Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X and a fellow minister sought the white supremacist terrorist group’s help in acquiring a “separate state” for black Americans opposed to integration. According to Malcolm X’s fellow minister, the Klansmen offered Nation members the right to wear “purple robes”...

In 1913, Frank was convicted of murdering 13-year-old Mary Phagan, who worked in his Atlanta factory. The case, charged with race, religion, sex and class, exploded in a national media frenzy. When Georgia's governor commuted Frank's death sentence, citizens took matters in their own hands. The case established the Anti-Defamation League as the country's most outspoken opponent of anti-Semitism. It also fueled the rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan. Until ADL lawyers pressed officials to posthumously pardon Frank in the 1980s, the case was hushed in Atlanta's synagogues, the homes of Old Marietta, and among Phagan's descendants.

MARIETTA, Ga. (AP) - Jewish congregations gathered in a suburban shopping center Wednesday to remember the lynching of a Jewish businessman on the same spot 90 years ago. Leo Frank was kidnapped from prison and hanged in 1915 after being convicted of killing a teenage girl at a pencil factory. Frank, a 29-year-old from New York City, had been sentenced to death for the 1913 strangulation of Mary Phagan, a 13-year-old worker whose body was found in the factory's coal bin. But the evidence against Frank was thin, and the governor commuted the sentence to life in prison. Two months...