Hi, I'm the History Guy. I have a degree in history,
and I love history. And if you love history too, this is the channel for you.
This is a channel about history, and I tend to shy away from current events,
if for no other reason than understanding of history can be skewed by current opinions.
But one of the best reasons to study history is that historical lessons can inform us about
current events, and sometimes the confluence between the two is just too much to ignore.
And so this week, when news broke out about violence at a Neo-Nazi rally in Virginia,
it was hard not to see the similarity to questions that were raised in Illinois,
40 years ago. In that incident, which people really don't understand very well, and if people
have heard of it it's probably because they saw the satirical representation in the 1980 film,
The Blues Brothers, rather than having any true historical understanding of events,
is actually very important. That event that the press dubbed, The Skokie Swastika War,
went to the very heart of understanding American constitutionally protected freedoms,
and what it means to live in a free society. And its history, that deserves to be remembered.
Located in the Chicago lawn neighborhood, and named after a French Jesuit missionary who was
one of the first Europeans to explore and map the northern portion of the Mississippi river,
at 323 acres, Marquette Park in Chicago is the largest park on the southwest side.
In 1966 Marquette Park was the location of a march led by Martin Luther King Jr, as part of
the Chicago Freedom Movement. During the march a crowd of white residents gathered, some waving
confederate flags or throwing bottles, bricks, and rocks at the protesters. One of the rocks hit Dr.
King in the head above his right ear, but he was not seriously hurt, and continued with the march.
It was a seminal moment in the campaign, which uncovered deep racism in the city of Chicago,
and attracted national press. While not wholly successful in achieving their goals, the Chicago
Freedom Movement was the most ambitious civil rights campaign in the north of the United States,
and is largely credited with inspiring the 1968 Fair Housing Act. The symbolism of Marquette
Park to the Civil Rights Movement is not lost on the people of Chicago, and the park now houses
a multimedia kiosk, to celebrate the march through pictures. videos, and oral histories.
But the symbolism of Marquette Park was also not lost on the people who threw stones.
Frank Colin was born in Chicago in 1944, he attended catholic elementary school and
high school, and briefly attended Southern Illinois University before dropping out.
At some point he became associated with the Neo-Nazi movement, which his grandmother
described as a mystery, because Colin's own father, was a jewish survivor of the holocaust.
Originally he joined the National Socialist White People's Party, but he had a falling out with them
and left to create his own party, The National Socialist Party of America, or NSPA, in 1970.
Colin located his organization in Chicago, partly because he thought the resistance to
the Chicago Freedom Movement meant that he would have supporters there. However
Illinois nazis found less success than Colin had hoped, in a community with
large numbers of immigrants from europe, whose relatives had suffered under nazi occupation.
Colin was at the center of many violent confrontations at protests,
and was arrested many times. Colin and the NSPA were well aware of the
symbolism of the park where Dr Martin Luther King Jr had been assaulted,
but when the city of Chicago refused to give them a permit to demonstrate in Marquette Park,
Collins sued, arguing that that was a violation of his first amendment rights.
In 1972, the Seventh US Circuit Court of Appeals upheld his complaint on First Amendment grounds,
and the city of Chicago was forced to give the NSPA a permit to demonstrate in Marquette Park.
The NSPA held intermittent rallies in Marquette Park from 1972 to 1976, but in 1976, the Chicago
Parks department changed the rules, and demanded a 250,000 bond to cover the cost of policing. Colin
sued the city of Chicago again, but this time he also sent notes to all the Chicago suburbs,
asking for permits for the NSPA to protest the Chicago Parks department's bond demands.
This is where the Chicago suburb of Skokie comes into the picture. While every other municipality
simply ignored Colin's request, Skokie responded by demanding an even higher bond, and passing
three ordinances. A liability insurance requirement, a ban on public demonstrations
by members of any political party wearing military style uniforms, and a prohibition of materials or
symbols that promoted hatred of people by reason of their race, national origin, or religion.
Skokie's response was different than the other Chicago suburbs for a very specific reason.
Skokie had a significant jewish population, the highest percentage of any of the Chicago
suburbs, and much of that population had moved there after the Second World War.
As one resident told the Chicago Tribune, Skokie was kind of a ground zero for holocaust survivors
in america, as many as six to seven thousand holocaust survivors, lived in Skokie.
But Skokie's response, and their jewish history, both played into Colin's need
for attention. And so Skokie became the focus of a new lawsuit, one that garnered national attention.
In a controversial move, Colin and the NSPA were represented by the American Civil Liberties Union.
While the ACLU was generally seen as supporting liberal causes,
it was an ardent advocate of freedom of speech, and had advocated on
behalf of free speech rights for anarchists, stalinists, and members of the ku klux klan.
As a testament to the sincerity of people's opinions,
many members of the ACLU objected to the ACLU taking this case,
and the organization lost hundreds of members. But the ACLA stuck to its principles.
The case was argued all the way to the United States Supreme Court which did not rule,
as many think on the actual free speech merits of the case but rather, instructed the state of
Illinois to provide strict procedural safeguards, if it moved to limit speech. In the decisions, the
courts freely admitted that the speech and ideas of Cullen, and the NSPA were highly offensive.
The attorneys for the village argued that the Nazi march, involving the display of uniforms
and swastikas, would create a substantive evil that the village had a right to prohibit.
The infliction of psychic trauma on resident holocaust survivors, and other jewish residents.
The US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit responded that they did not deny that the display
would cause psychological trauma to the residents, but the court noted that the entire purpose of the
first amendment was to protect speech that might invite dispute. Quoting a previous Supreme Court
decision, “It is firmly settled, that under our Constitution, the public expression of ideas
may not be prohibited merely because the ideas are themselves, offensive to some of their hearers”.
The court was affirming a simple principle: courts and governments are not allowed to ban speech
because the ideas are unpopular, no matter how offensive that may be.
That is in fact, the entire point of the first amendment. The court, noting their own disgust
with the ideas espoused by the NSPA, also noted that their own disgust could not be considered.
As Judge Wilbur Frank Pell attests, “Ideological tyranny, no matter how worthy its motivation,
is forbidden as much to appointed judges, as to elected officials”.
By 1978 the ACLU had won all the constitutional arguments, and the Nazis
had won the right to a rally in Skokie. Rather anticlimactically, that rally never occurred.
Colin had agreed to a compromise, and instead of marching in Skokie the NSPA was allowed to
march where it all began, in Marquette Park. They held a couple rallies there,
and a couple rallies in downtown Chicago but in all cases the couple hundred members
of the NSPA were wildly outnumbered by thousands of counter protesters.
It seems the national attention had not helped Colin in the way that he thought it might.
In 1979, in an apparent power struggle over control of the organization, Colin's own people
turned him into police, having found evidence in his desk that he had illicit affairs with minors.
He was convicted of child molestation, and sentenced to seven years in prison. He served the
minimum three years, and upon release, left the Nazi Party, and under the pseudonym Frank Joseph,
started writing neo-pagan books full of wild theories about the lost continent of Atlantis.
The Skokie controversy raised interest in the United States
in education about the Holocaust, and sparked a surprising change in the village of Skokie.
Whereas before residents were reticent to talk about their experience in the Holocaust,
after Colin, residents opened up in a storefront, a Holocaust Museum and Education Center, in 1984.
In 1987 they dedicated a memorial to the Holocaust in downtown Skokie. In 1999, Skokie residents
convinced the Illinois legislature to become the first state to require Holocaust education in its
schools. And in 2009, the Holocaust Museum and Education Center left their storefront,
for a 45 million dollar, new Holocaust Museum and Education Center, that now receives more
than 300,000 visitors a year. JB Pritzer, who was in charge of raising those 45 million dollars,
credits the Skokie controversy with driving the interest in Holocaust
education in the United States. He said, “It is was a shot heard around the world
for Holocaust education”. And Richard Hershat, who's the Executive Director of the museum noted
that it was in the late 1970s, that Skokie put the whole subject on the map.
It didn't just spark an interest in Holocaust education though, as Jeffrey R Stone,
who was an attorney for the ACLU who was involved in the case noted in an editorial in 2011,
“It triggered one of those rare and remarkable moments in american history,
when citizens throughout the nation vigorously debated,
the meaning of the US Constitution”. And Ari Nair, who was Executive Director of the ACLU at the time
noted that, “at every step of the way the same lesson emerged, that in a nation where
free speech generally prevails, it is best to take hate speech in stride”.
You know hate groups, and racial hate still exists in the United States,
and there's still a distressing level of hate crime. The controversy certainly raised strong
emotions on both sides, and definitely distressed the people of Skokie. But it sparked conversations
that moved the nation forward. As Mr Nair notes, “If you respond to speech by trying to prevent
speech or responding with violence, all you do is give hate groups the attention that they crave”.
I'm the History Guy and I hope you enjoyed this edition of my series, five minutes of history,
short snippets of forgotten history five to ten minutes long. And if you
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