The Nazis' Neighborhood

That National Socialist Party of America headquarters that Larry Langford visited in the 1970s was located in Marquette Park, a portion of the Southwest Side’s broader Chicago Lawn area.

Today, Marquette Park is a black and Latino neighborhood. But before the neo-Nazis moved in, it was infamous for its hostility towards African-Americans. In the 1970s it had a mixed population of “white ethnics” including Lithuanian-, Polish-, German-, and Irish-Americans, as well as a small population of Arab-Americans.

Langford grew up nearby in Englewood, and he says Marquette Park had a reputation.

That reputation got national attention in 1966, when the Chicago Freedom Movement organized a series of marches and protests on Chicago’s Southwest Side with the goal of ending housing segregation in the city. Martin Luther King Jr. helped organized a march in Marquette Park on August 5. White residents responded violently, charging the marchers and throwing bricks and bottles. An object struck King’s head, and the Chicago Tribune quotes him saying that day: “I've been in many demonstrations all across the South, but I can say that I have never seen — even in Mississippi and Alabama — mobs as hostile and as hate-filled as I've seen here in Chicago.”

News of the violent reactions to King’s march attracted George Lincoln Rockwell, the founder of the American Nazi Party. Rockwell maintained a barracks with several dozen followers near Washington, D.C. They wore versions of Nazi uniforms and, since the early-’60s, had tried building a serious political movement around anti-Semitism and racism. Rockwell called desegregation a Jewish plot to weaken the white race through genetic mixing. He wanted to deport black Americans to Africa and to sterilize American Jews.

Mark Potok, a senior fellow at the Southern Poverty Law Center, studies hate groups. He says Rockwell’s American Nazi Party was “seen as a freak marginal phenomenon in society. They weren’t taken seriously at all.”

At the urging of the Anti-Defamation League and other groups, the mainstream media agreed to not cover American Nazi Party rallies, effectively denying the group a national platform. But Rockwell tried to get around this quarantine with attention-seeking tactics. He’d march with uniformed “storm troopers” on the National Mall or drive around the country in a so-called “hate bus” adorned with swastikas and anti-integration slogans.

It was this quest for attention that bought Rockwell to Chicago’s Southwest Side. Shortly after King was hit in the head, Rockwell arrived in Chicago to hand out pamphlets and “White Power” T-shirts with swastikas on them. He confronted King face-to-face at one rally, and led a so-called “White People’s March” on Sept. 10, 1966. About 150 demonstrators in “White Power” T-shirts marched with Rockwell from the majority-white Gage Park neighborhood to the predominantly African-American Englewood.

According to the New York Times, most of the marchers were not members of Rockwell’s American Nazi Party, but instead white residents of the Southwest Side. Potok says the “White People’s March” was an unusually large display of mainstream support for somebody as marginalized as Rockwell. Arguably, Rockwell’s greatest mainstream success came from tapping into segregationist sentiment not in the American South, but on Chicago’s Southwest Side.

Within a year after the march, Rockwell was assassinated by another neo-Nazi. However, he had made an impression on Marquette Park and inspired Chicago native Frank Collin to follow in his footsteps.

For the most part, Collin’s neo-Nazi group confined their actions to Chicago’s Southwest Side or majority-white suburbs like Cicero and Berwyn. Marches in those neighborhoods attracted the attention of Buzz Alpert, the chair of the Chicago Chapter of the Jewish Defense League.

Alpert led a group of mostly young Jewish men who would physically attack neo-Nazis during their marches or rallies. Alpert has many war stories from these street fights. He says during the first confrontation between the two groups, he physically barred Collin and his second-in-command from marching on the sidewalk in Berwyn.

“[Collin] said, ‘Who are you?’ and I said, ‘JDL,’” Alpert remembers. “I just reached out, took the two by the throat, and dove at them. We had one hell of a fight. We were outnumbered two to one, but we licked the streets with them. The Nazis were stunned that they had been beaten by Jews.”

This is Alpert’s account and we can’t verify the exact details. But film footage confirms Alpert fought the neo-Nazis, at least until the police break them up.

Alpert claims some of the neo-Nazis quit the group after getting beaten up by the JDL. But he says “Collin loved getting his picture taken with a little blood on his face.”

Alpert admits the spectacle of street fights may have helped the neo-Nazi’s get attention but he defends the tactic to this day:

Despite the marches and street fights, for the early part of the 1970s, Collin’s group struggled to gain attention. When members appeared in newspapers, they were usually the subject of ridicule in the back pages.

In 1977, the Chicago City Council passed an ordinance requiring any demonstrator in public parks to have $250,000 in insurance in order to obtain a permit. This was widely understood as an attempt to crack down on the neo-Nazis.

But it ultimately backfired and thrust Collin into the national spotlight.

Collin could not afford the insurance, so he applied for permits in nearby suburbs, including Skokie, which had (and still has) a large Jewish population. The north suburb had an estimated 7,000 Holocaust survivors living there in the mid-1970s.

According to then-ACLU lawyer David Goldberger, most of the suburbs simply ignored Collin’s request for a permit, but Skokie rejected the request outright. Collin afterward announced he would sue Skokie for the right to march.

Collin approached the ACLU of Illinois for help and spoke to Goldberger, who was the legal director at the time. Goldberger is Jewish and says talking to Collin “was something nobody [in the ACLU] looked forward to.”

But Goldberger also felt that Collin’s request — the right to peaceably assemble in a public space — was guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution. The ACLU had made similar arguments on behalf of civil rights protesters, and Goldberger felt those free speech rights should be defended, regardless of the plaintiff.

Deciding to represent the neo-Nazi group was an unpopular decision. The ACLU lost nearly 100,000 members, about a 30 percent decline in membership, within a four year span. Goldberger says it was also personally difficult.

The ensuing legal battle lasted over a year, involved three separate court cases, and made national headlines. In the end, Collin won the right to hold a demonstration in Skokie.

Many in Skokie and Chicago were concerned for the mental health of Holocaust survivors facing the prospect of men in Nazi uniforms marching through their village. People across the nation wrote sympathetic letters to Skokie and suggested creative tactics to counter the march. In the spring of 1978, there were rumors that people were planning to get violent or even bring guns to the neo-Nazi march.

The U.S. Department of Justice sought a compromise, and Collin agreed to stay out of Skokie if Chicago gave him permits to demonstrate in downtown’s Federal Plaza and in Marquette Park. He held rallies in both places in the summer of 1978.

Though the neo-Nazi march was averted in Skokie, the legal battle around it had a lasting impact on the local Jewish community, and prompted the formation of the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center in Skokie.

The question of how to confront hate groups or whether they have free speech rights may be important, but it can also distract from a bigger question: What role did their neighborhood play in allowing them to become a source of fear and consternation in Skokie, and the greater Chicago area, in the late 1970s?

Of course, some Marquette Park residents weren’t so tolerant of the neo-Nazis. Film footage from 1976 shows a middle-aged man from the neighborhood getting right in the face of a neo-Nazis handing out literature, telling him, “You don’t speak for me.”

But Emanuel says he joined a counter-protest with his father in Marquette Park in July of 1978, after the neo-Nazis announced they would march there instead of Skokie. He says Collin’s supporters far outnumbered the counter-protesters. Film footage shows hundreds of people screaming slurs; most appear not to be official members of Collin’s group. Some identify themselves as residents of Marquette Park or nearby neighborhoods.

One of the men, a Marquette Park resident identified as Oliver Adams, was interviewed for the documentary Echoes of a Nightmare. In it he says, “We don’t want the neighborhood to go to shit. We don’t want rapes and robberies. That’s why I got my White Power shirt on and you’ll see a lot more today from people who aren’t Nazis.”

In a shot from another film, a white neighborhood resident is seen stuffing cash into the neo-Nazi donation jar.

This support is bizarre when you remember World War II was only around 30 years past, and many people who supported or tolerated Collin would have been veterans or known people who were killed or injured in the fight against Nazi Germany. If enough people complained or protested, Marquette Park could have evicted the neo-Nazis or at least forced them to be less visible. Why were they allowed to remain for nearly a decade?

People familiar with Marquette Park in the 1970s, including Larry Langford and Mark Potok, agree on an answer: The neo-Nazis’ opposition to African-Americans moving into the neighborhood earned them tolerance and, in some cases, support. Susan O’Halloran grew up nearby in Wrightwood and has strong memories of Marquette Park in the ‘60s and ’70s. O’Halloran says racism and fear were stoked by real estate agents who sent mailers erroneously warning white residents that their peaceful neighborhood would be plagued by crime and home values would drop.

“They felt like they were going to lose their home — that little postage-stamp lawn and little bungalow house. That was everything they had worked for for their family, and it was portrayed to them [that] it was under attack from black people.”

The Nazis may have been considered odd or extreme by many residents, but fear of integration was widespread. Without that strain of mainstream white racism, the neighborhood may not have tolerated a building with a swastika over the door or Nazi-uniformed men living inside it.

That tolerance mattered.

Without their neighborhood — without a home base where they could organize, live and raise money — Collin and his group of neo-Nazis may never have had a chance to get so much attention, and cause so much distress.