The national tour of Parade, a Tony award-winning musical about the real-life lynching of a Jewish man in 1915, arrives at the Kennedy Center this week amid President Trump's takeover of the institution, and an antisemitic backlash amplified by a member of the Trump administration.
Parade, which ends its national tour in Washington, dramatizes the murder of Mary Phagan and the trial of Leo Frank, who is widely believed to have been falsely accused.
Though the case is more than a century old, it continues to spark controversy from the far-right —including neo-Nazis, right-wing influencers, and the current press secretary at the Department of Defense, who has denied accusations of antisemitism. As NPR has reported, several prominent officials in the Trump administration have ties to antisemitic extremists and Holocaust deniers, even as the White House says it is focused on fighting antisemitic hate.
Trump's transformation of the Kennedy Center has included installing himself as chairman and removing what he calls "woke political programming." In response, some artists have canceled their performances at the storied venue.
Jason Robert Brown, who wrote the music and lyrics for Parade, took a different approach.
"PARADE is playing the Kennedy Center in August and we're not changing One Word," he wrote on social media in February following Trump's takeover.
In an email to NPR, Brown emphasized the importance of performing the show at the Kennedy Center, which he called "America's stage."
"PARADE is the story of Mary Phagan and Leo Frank, yes, but more than that, it has always been the story of the currents of hatred running underneath America," Brown wrote. "As those currents seem at the moment to be overflowing their banks, I am grateful for the opportunity to share our counternarrative."
The Leo Frank trial: a media circus
The murder of Mary Phagan and the trial of Leo Frank was one of the most notorious true-crime spectacles of the early 20th century.
In the early 1900s, Frank worked as the superintendent of a pencil factory in Atlanta. He was an outsider several times over: a northerner in a southern city, an industrialist in an agricultural state, and a Jew in an overwhelmingly Christian society.
In 1913, 13-year-old Phagan, who worked at the factory, was found dead in the building's basement. Prosecutors, relying on scant evidence, accused Frank of murder. A Black janitor at the factory, Jim Conley, claimed he had moved the dead body to the basement at Frank's request, though his story shifted over time. Frank maintained his innocence.
The subsequent trial became a media circus, warped by antisemitism, racism and the threat of mob violence. On the day of the verdict, the judge kept Frank and his attorney away from the courtroom, fearing an acquittal would spark vigilante violence.
Frank was convicted and sentenced to death. Georgia's governor commuted Frank's sentence to life in prison amid growing doubts about the evidence.
In response, Tom Watson, a white supremacist Georgia politician and newspaper writer, railed against Frank as a "Jewish hunter of gentile girls" and called for his lynching. On Aug. 16, 1915, a group of men, including some prominent local leaders, stormed the prison where Frank was being held, drove him to Phagan's hometown and hanged him from an oak tree. Photos of the lynching were sold as postcards. The perpetrators were never charged. Watson, who publicly incited and later defended the lynching, was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1920.
The incident fueled the revival of the Ku Klux Klan, but also the creation of the Anti-Defamation League, the Jewish civil rights group. Historians have concluded that Frank was the victim of antisemitic prejudice and likely innocent. In 1986, the state of Georgia pardoned Frank, because of the state's failure to protect him in custody and hold his killers accountable.
From history to the stage
Playwright Alfred Uhry grew up in Atlanta in the shadow of the Frank case. His family was Jewish and knew the Franks, but he said the story of the lynching was shrouded in mystery.
"The German Jewish community was very small," Uhry told NPR in an interview. "But when I was born, nobody talked about it at all. I had to go to the library to look it up when I was a kid. It was very important to me to be able to tell the story."
Uhry, who won an Oscar and Pulitzer Prize for the film and play Driving Miss Daisy, went on to write the 1998 musical Parade about Frank's case. Though the show won Tony awards, Uhry said it was not a major success.
The 2023 Broadway revival of Parade made a much bigger mark.
"Either fortunately or unfortunately, the zeitgeist was with us that the thing got very timely," Uhry said.
Part of that zeitgeist was the rise of antisemitic hate.
In February 2023, a group of white supremacists protested the production, handing out leaflets calling Frank a "pedophile."
"It looked just like the props in the show," Uhry said.
"The neo-Nazi playbook" moves to the mainstream
The extremist claims about Leo Frank have spread beyond neo-Nazis.
In March 2023 — just a few weeks after the protest outside of Parade made national headlines — the right wing influencer Kingsley Wilson posted on social media about the case.
Leo Frank raped & murdered a 13-year-old girl.
— Kingsley Wilson (@KingsleyCortes) March 11, 2023
He also tried to frame a black man for his crime.
The ADL is demonic. https://t.co/BGfjjxxAUh
"Leo Frank raped & murdered a 13-year-old girl," she wrote. "He also tried to frame a black man for his crime. The ADL is demonic."
(She later edited the post to change "demonic" to "despicable," according to the post's edit history on X.)
The following year she repeated the accusation in response to the ADL's commemoration of the anniversary of Frank's lynching.
Earlier this year, Wilson joined the Trump Administration. She now serves as press secretary for the Department of Defense.
The American Jewish Committee called Wilson "unfit" for office, writing that she was sharing "antisemitic conspiracy theories lifted right out of the neo-Nazi playbook."
At a tense Senate hearing, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth defended Wilson.
"She does a fantastic job," Hegseth said. "And any suggestion that I or her or others are party to antisemitism is a mischaracterization attempting to win political points."
"Pentagon Press Secretary Kingsley Wilson has never promoted antisemitism," Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said in a statement to NPR. "The ADL and other left-wing groups like it have erroneously attacked Mrs. Wilson's character because she is a fighter for President Trump and a loyal solider [sic] of Secretary Hegseth. We will continue to dismiss this false accusation and focus on delivering President Trump's America First agenda at the Department of Defense."
The Pentagon declined to answer NPR's question about whether Wilson stands by her social media posts about the Frank case, which remain online.
The far-right influencer and conspiracy theorist Candace Owens has also promoted antisemitic theories about Frank on several episodes of her podcast.
"He looks evil to me," Owens said in one episode from 2024.
Owens has woven the Frank case into a broader antisemitic narrative that alleges that Judaism and the state of Israel promote pedophilia.
Oren Segal, the senior vice president of counter-extremism and intelligence at the ADL, told NPR in an interview that these narratives have migrated from extremist circles to the mainstream. He noted that the rise of the QAnon conspiracy theory, which includes allegations of a global pedophile ring, has helped extremists repackage century-old hatred toward Frank for the social media age.
"More than 100 years later, the antisemitic mob still exists," said Segal. "They just may not be on the streets of Georgia, but they may be on every social media channel that we all exist on. And so in some ways, it's the same hatred, but the reach is much, much farther."
Uhry declined to comment on Wilson's posts about Frank, saying he wanted the focus to remain on the artistry of Parade.
Writer-composer Brown, in his email to NPR, drew a sharp connection between the past and present, noting the contrasting figures of Watson, the white supremacist politician who incited Frank's lynching, and Georgia Gov. John Slaton, who commuted Frank's sentence despite threats to his own life.
"112 years after the murder of Mary Phagan, the vile racist incitements spewed by Tom Watson continue to be repeated by people at the highest levels of our government," he wrote, "and the bravery of Governor Slaton remains a powerful example of the risks we must be prepared to take to fight against injustice in this country. You cannot tell the story of America without telling the story of Leo Frank and Mary Phagan."
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