There are so many lessons to be taken from the story of Leo Frank: Good things don't happen when people stand by silently while injustice is committed; racism and xenophobia only lead to death and destruction; and facing our past is vital for a brighter future.

Frank was the Jewish manager of a pencil factory in Atlanta in 1913 when a 13-year-old girl named Mary Phagan was found raped and murdered in the basement. A black janitor, named Jim Conley, became the main witness against Frank. Evidence was not properly preserved or examined, and some pointed the finger at Conley, who the politically ambitious prosecutor said couldn't have done it because he wasn't bright enough to think up the scheme.

Frank was convicted and sentenced to death. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court but was denied. The governor, at the time, commuted Frank's death sentence to life in prison with the hope that the truth would come out. It was a decision that wrecked his political career.

Angry at the commutation, a gang of "respected" community leaders, including a former governor, a former mayor and a U.S. senator's son, abducted Frank from prison without resistance and lynched him. It is the only known case of a Jewish person being lynched on U.S. soil.

According to CNN, which recently aired a report on this intriguing case:

Considered one of the most sensational trials of the early 20th century, the Frank case seemed to press every hot-button issue of the time: North vs. South, black vs. white, Jew vs. Christian, industrial vs. agrarian.

Frank's lynching left Georgia's small Jewish community frightened. Many left the state; those who stayed kept a low profile. For decades, they only spoke of Frank in hushed tones. ...Georgia Jews remained quiet, so did those who were involved in Frank's killing, said Steve Oney of Los Angeles, California, who wrote the authoritative book 'And the Dead Shall Rise: The Murder of Mary Phagan and the Lynching of Leo Frank.' It would be about 80 years before members of the lynching party were publicly, and not just secretly, known.






Members of Phagan's and Frank's family also tried to deeply bury this secret.

"The story goes that no one in my family talked about it," Cathee Smithline, a 62-year-old great-niece of Frank, told CNN.

Over the years, there have been several books written and movies made about the incident. Now, the CNN report is shedding new light on the case.

What lessons can we apply today from this almost-100-year-old story? First, we must not let xenophobia and racism continue to grow in this country. During last year's presidential elections, some Americans believed President Obama was a Muslim (he's Christian). The accusation was hurled as if it were some sort of slur.

Frank was a northern Jewish man in the Deep South. Although he was a white man, he was different. Because he was different, that made him suspect.

The prosecutor was also so racist that he failed to think a black man was smart enough to commit such a crime and successfully cover it up. Talk about adding insult to injury. Usually, if a black man so much as looked at a white woman the wrong way back then it could end in a lynching. Depending on who you asked, Conley was being defined as unintelligent or a murderer. That was the extent of the expectations for a black man in the Deep South in 1913.

The second lesson is that we must all stand up against injustice and not wait on the so-called high and mighty to handle things. In Frank's case, and that of the thousands of black men who became strange fruit, the most respected members of society were the ones doing the lynching.

Fortunately, today, the work of organizations such as the Innocence Project are dedicated to helping the wrongly convicted. So far, the group has used DNA evidence to clear 245 men of crimes that landed them in jail for a significant amount of their lives. Seventy percent of those cleared are people of color, and I bet the overwhelming majority were poor. No one believed these people when they proclaimed their innocence, and a lack of money for a good lawyer and testing helped doom them to conviction.

Finally, in order to learn anything from these sort of incidents, people have to first know about them. It is our job to pass these stories along and discuss them in frank and open terms. Roy Barnes, the former governor of Georgia whose grandfather-in-law was one of the 25 men who helped lynched Frank, put it best:

"It's a terrible blot on our history," he told CNN. "How we keep it from happening again is to never forget."