National Socialist Party of America

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The National Socialist Party of America was an extremist Chicago-based organization founded in 1970 by Frank Collin shortly after he left the National Socialist White People's Party. The NSWPP had been the American Nazi Party until shortly after the assassination of leader George Lincoln Rockwell in 1967. Collin, a follower of Rockwell, developed differences with his successor Matt Koehl.

The party's headquarters were in Chicago's Marquette Park, and its main activity in the early 1970s was organizing loud demonstrations against African-Americans moving into previously all-white neighbourhoods. The marches and community reaction led the city of Chicago to ban all demonstrations in Marquette Park unless they paid an insurance fee of $250,000. While challenging the city's actions in the courts, the party decided to redirect its attention to Chicago's outlying suburbs which had no such restrictions.

In 1977 Collin announced the party's intention to march through the largely Jewish community of Skokie, Illinois where one in six residents was a Holocaust survivor. A legal battle ensued when the village attempted to ban the event, and the party, represented by an (ironically, Jewish) ACLU lawyer in court, won the right to march on First Amendment grounds in National Socialist Party v. Village of Skokie, a lawsuit carried all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, though it failed to carry through its intention (at the last minute, Chicago relented and they marched there instead). The notoriety gained from this incident led to the party being spoofed in the 1980 movie The Blues Brothers.

The party collapsed after Collin was charged and convicted in 1980 of sexually abusing young boys, and it emerged he had rejected his own Jewish ancestry.