National Socialist Party of America

National Socialist Party of America
National Socialist Party of America
Abbreviation	NSPA
Leader	Frank Collin (1970–1977); Harold Covington (1977–1981)
Founded	1970; 54 years ago
Dissolved	1981; 43 years ago
Split from	American Nazi Party
Headquarters	Chicago, Illinois; Raleigh, North Carolina
Ideology	Neo-Nazism; White supremacism; White nationalism; Antisemitism
Political position	Far-right
	Politics of United States; Political parties; Elections;

The National Socialist Party of America (NSPA) was a 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 its leader George Lincoln Rockwell in 1967. Collin, a follower of Rockwell, developed differences with his successor Matt Koehl.

The party's headquarters was in Chicago's Marquette Park, and its main activity in the early 1970s was organizing loud demonstrations against black people moving into previously all-white neighborhoods. The marches and community reaction led the city of Chicago in 1977 to ban all demonstrations in Marquette Park unless they paid an insurance fee of $250,000 (equivalent to $1.26 million in 2023).^[1]^[2] While challenging the city's actions in the courts, the party decided to redirect its attention to Chicago's suburbs, which had no such restrictions.

Harold Covington succeeded Collin as leader of the NSPA in 1979,^[3] before dissolving the organization in 1981.^[4]

Skokie controversy

Nazi leader Frank Collin made announcement at a news conference in 1978

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 a Jewish ACLU lawyer in court, they 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).