Chicago wrestles with rights—and riots
In the 1960s, federal courts invoked the First Amendment principles of free speech and free assembly to protect civil rights marches in some of the inflamed Southern cities. Despite wholesale threats of violence, the resulting demonstrations were peaceful, thanks to state and local police ordered in by the courts. But constitutional rights protected in Selma, Ala., in 1965 apparently cannot be secured in Chicago in 1977.
Last week, for instance, fearful that civil order would be disturbed, the city was seeking a court order to prevent a black civil rights group even from marching on the public sidewalks in the allwhite Marquette Park area. Authorities also passed the word they would grant no parade permits there this month to Jewish, Nazi or black groups, because Marquette Park is already booked up with sport and youth events, and "traffic problems" would result. More important, as the Marquette area's deputy chief of patrol Charles Pepp admitted, "a march could very well precipitate a major race riot."
The season's troubles started when Frank Collin, self-styled Fuhrer of a tiny Chicago-based Nazi splinter group called the National Socialist Party of America, announced plans for a May 1 parade through Skokie, a heavily Jewish suburb north of Chicago. Some 7,000 survivors of World War II Nazi concentration camps live in the village. Skokie authorities swiftly banned the demonstration, and militant Jewish Defense League spokesmen promised to keep the Nazi marchers out with force.
Appealing to the courts, the Nazis rescheduled their parade for July 4. But even after the U.S. Supreme Court in mid-June ordered a fast review, an Illinois appellate court scheduled a hearing for July 8, then ruled that any Nazi march through Skokie must be without swastikas. The reasoning: the symbol constitutes "fighting words" that would provoke the ordinary Skokie citizen to violence, and thus cannot be tolerated as ordinary free speech. Rather than march denuded of swastikas, the Nazis appealed further.
With that, attention shifted to a very different kind of conflict in the attractive, ordinarily tranquil Marquette Park area. Surrounding the park is a blue-collar ethnic neighborhood (Polish, Irish, Lithuanian) of shaded streets, neatly trimmed lawns and well-maintained bungalows, one of the last white enclaves in the city. Not coincidentally, it is also the site of the headquarters of Collin's Nazi party. Last summer, during a civil rights march there, 16 citizens and 16 police were injured in the ensuing riot. Lately crowds of up to 1,500 beer-swigging white youths have swarmed around the park, brandishing baseball bats, stones and bottles, and attacking black motorists. Most black leaders have given up attempts to integrate the park.