Frank Collin

rdf:langString Frank Collin

rdf:langString Frank Collin

rdf:langString Frank Collin

rdf:langString Position established

rdf:langString Political activist, New Age author

rdf:langString Francis Joseph Collin (born November 3, 1944) is an American former political activist and Midwest coordinator with the American Nazi Party, later known as the National Socialist White People's Party. After being ousted for being partly Jewish (which he denied), in 1970, Collin founded the National Socialist Party of America. (N.S.P.A.) In the late 1970s, his planned march in the predominantly Jewish suburb of Skokie, Illinois was challenged; however, the American Civil Liberties Union defended Collin's group's freedom of speech and assembly in a case that reached the United States Supreme Court to correct procedural deficiencies. Afterwards, the Illinois Supreme Court held that the party had a right to march and to display swastikas, despite local opposition, based on the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. Collin then offered a compromise, offering to march in Chicago's Marquette Park (where Martin Luther King had been attacked in 1966) instead of Skokie. After Collin was convicted and sentenced in 1979 for child molestation, he lost his position in the party. After being released early on parole from prison, Collin created a new career as a writer, publishing numerous books under the pen name Frank Joseph. He wrote New Age and "hyperdiffusionist" works supporting the pseudoarchaeological idea that Old World peoples had migrated to North America in ancient times and created its complex societies of indigenous peoples. This thesis is rejected by mainstream scholars.