Lifeat9200rpms: Skokie, Frank Collin-Cohen and the ACLU

      This is another in an occasional series of entries made possible by my mechanical circulatory support system, my LVAD, without which I would have been toast by now. 

     As I was about to finish law school at Loyola in Chicago, I worked days as a newspaper reporter covering the federal courts and agencies for the Chicago Sun-Times.  The year was 1977.

     Frank Collin, who was 33 at the time, was the leader of the National Socialist Party of America, formerly the American Nazi Party.  I was surprised to learn that Collin is still around. He is an author and self proclaimed witch, who served three years of a seven year Illinois prison sentence for child molesting. The criminal charges led to his ouster as head of the NSPA Collin was born Francis Joseph Cohen in November, 1944. 

     No one knew he was Jewish when he made his Nazi speeches, or led the NSPA.  That information was not something he willingly shared. In fact, Collin called his father a liar, when the elder Collin talked to a United Press International reporter about being Jewish and a Dachau death camp survivor, originally named Cohen.  Information suggesting Collin's Jewish ancestry was first published in 1970.  

     Collin gave a series of neo-Nazi "political" speeches in Chicago area parks and led demonstrations, including one in suburban Riverside. The creed he espoused was anti-black, antisemitic and anti-just about everything.  Chicago banned him from its parks.  He looked for another target.  

     He wanted to make a statement with his swastika bearing, brown shirted, jack booted, rag-tag irregular band of misfits and drew a bead on Skokie, Illinois.  Skokie is a near north suburb of Chicago that was home to the largest population of Nazi death camp survivors. Collin wanted to hold his demonstration on July 4, 1978.

     There were about 70,000 residents in the suburb in 1974, about 45,000 of them were Holocaust survivors or descendants of those sent to the camps.  You can imagine the intensity of the emotional climate surrounding a neo-Nazi demonstration under such circumstances.

     Skokie leaders refused to go quietly about their business and let Collin and his neo-Nazi band parade in their quiet village.  City leaders adopted several ordinances, essentially banning the Nazis from marching.  The laws were couched in the form of a parade permit ordinance, no parading in uniform bearing swastikas, and requiring a bond to indemnify the village against property damage.

     Collin and his Nazis could not get a permit and could not buy insurance.  In essence, Skokie had stalemated them. But would the village's ordinances withstand First Amendment analysis?

     Enter the American Civil Liberties Union and its main lawyer in Chicago, David Goldberger, himself Jewish.  The ACLU took on Collin's case because Skokie's anti-Nazi laws were an affront to the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.  

     Goldberger was criticized by the Jewish Defense League and Jewish War Veterans among other groups.  The ACLU in Chicago reportedly lost financial support and members as a result of the representation of Collin.  Two years after the neo-Nazi case, Goldberger became a professor of law at the Ohio State University's Moritz School of Law.

     Francis Joseph Cohen, then known as Frank Collin, came to the attention of the federal building press corps when he decided to lead a demonstration in Skokie, Illinois.  He threatened to march with or without a permit.  The ACLU filed suit against Skokie claiming violations of the First Amendment's guarantee of free speech and the right to assemble as applied to the state's through the Fourteenth Amendment.

     The case was one of those that underscores the need to protect the rights of us all whether we like those asserting the right or their message.  Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes maintained that we must defend "even the thought we hate." 

     U.S. District Court Judge Bernard M. Decker held a trial on the lawsuit December 2, 1977.  The following February, Judge Decker issued his opinion, holding all of Skokie's anti-parade laws unconstitutional. 

     Decker said, "The ability of American society to tolerate the advocacy even of the hateful doctrines espoused by the plaintiffs without abandoning its commitment to freedom of speech and assembly is perhaps the best protection we have against the establishment of any Nazi‑type regime in this country."  He was affirmed on appeal up to the Supreme Court of the United States.

      In the end, after some negotiations with the U.S. Department of Justice and Chicago and Skokie leaders, Collin and his motley crew abandoned the Skokie demonstration and instead marched on the federal post office plaza below an Alexander Calder sculpture,  entitled Flamingo, 53 feet high, some 60 feet long and some 20 feet wide, that dominated the plaza.  Pyrotechnics with no flash and no bang but a whimper under a flamingo. The compromise was good because it saved injuries, if not lives.  Skokie's anxiety was normalized.  I attended the Collin demonstration. There were about a dozen demonstrators, no counter demonstrators, no violence, and police made no arrests.  The First Amendment lives.