50336514
Frank Meeink was a neo-Nazi. In April 1995, Meeink was glued to a TV at Fourth and Jackson streets, watching the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing. He knew, in his gut, the second the news broke the man behind it was connected to the movement.
“I was already out of it at this point. I was just thinking, ‘This is the movement. This is the movement I came from,” Meeink, a former Whitman resident, said. “I just kept seeing this image of the little girl in the fireman’s arms. I hadn’t seen my daughter in a year.”
At that time, Meeink had spent his formative teenage years as a leader in the White Supremacy movement. Today, Meeink spends time teaching about the origins of hate and how to prevent bullying. After being connected with Jody M. Roy, Ph.D., Meeink decided his story should be told and the two published “Autobiography of a Recovering Skinhead,” in 2009.
“I told her I’d help her with the book project and we went out to dinner,” Meeink said of a project Roy was working on, in which he was one of a few case studies. “While at a dinner I said, ‘I’m more than a chapter. I’d like to write my own book.’ She said, ‘Let me think about it.’ She finished her book project and called me back.”
“Autobiography” has gotten praise for its brutal honesty and insightful recollection of how organized hatred can prey on people in search of being heard.
“Oh absolutely, [the skinhead prevalence in Philadelphia] was definitely noticeable. It was noticeable in Southwest, down on Second and Snyder. Pennsylvania was becoming the leading hate state back then — the late 80s, early 90s. It was the start of this huge movement,” Meeink, who had spent early days with his mom in a rowhome on Second and Wolf streets, said.
Meeink was lucky enough to survive and began to turn things around when he was in prison. Locked up, the Aryan pick-up game players — most of whom were at least twice his then 18-years-of-age — weren’t fulfilling his sports needs.
“The two other kids I knew were these black kids, one was a kid named G. We were on the same cellblock. They said, ‘Alright, you’re kind of good, but these other black kids are gunna kill you if you keep playing.’ And I said, ‘I won’t let them catch me. I’m that fast,’” Meeink, who had played football at E.O.M., 138 Moore St., said. “Those two just kinda became my boys.”
Meeink’s weakness, it turned out, was ignorance, and he spent the next handful of years slowly undoing the rhetoric he had been fed as a child. Now, a happily married man and father to five, Meeink spreads his story in the hopes of preventing others from falling prey as he did. The diehard Flyers fan has also developed several programs, including “Harmony Through Hockey,” an urban-youth league to bring together multi-national players, and a targeted any-bullying campaign.
“My life now, I’ve helped start an anti-bullying campaign, ‘Kindness Not Weakness,’” Meeink said of the organization that advocates active interventions from bystanders in a strength-in-numbers approach to combating bullying. “It’s a bunch of former skinheads coming together, talking about how we can help stop it.”
In addition to multiple speaking engagements and his book, Meeink’s most recent project has been developing a show for a well-known cable network that is set to premiere in the fall.
“We go in and we try and do an intervention on haters and bullies. We’ll make them live with the people that they hate and the people they bully,” Meeink, 35, said. “That’s what happened to me. I lived with them and I was like, ‘I can’t hate these f#%$ing people.’”
Meeink was born to an Irish mother and Italian father, who occupied a small space in Southwest Philadelphia. By age 2, his mother walked out and brought a young Meeink to live with her parents near Mifflin Square.
“I grew up around Second Street, Second and Porter. I would kind of hang around there,” Meeink said. “We lived in a house at Fourth and Tree.”
Meeink believes much of the seeds of hatred were sewn when he had to move in with his Dad in Southwest Philadelphia and attend Pepper Middle School, where he was attacked and viciously beaten by a gang in the area, the Junior Black Mafia, on a regular basis.
“I was tired. I started cutting school, staying away from school. I hung with my cousin who lived in Lancaster and he was in to [neo-Nazism], and that’s how I was first approached. When I was 14,” Meeink said.
What followed was a savage career as a supporter and activist in the White Supremacy Movement, that included numerous beatings, vandalisms and acts in the name of the movement. He would spend those early nights on “Skinhead Alley,” near Sixth Street between Bainbridge and South streets, recruiting. Meeink would eventually become a notorious leader of his own group and broadcast a cable-access show called “The Reich.”
Beginning with his one-year incarceration in the Midwest, Meeink slowly began losing faith in his beliefs, until he eventually left all hatred aside.
“There is no possible way I can judge someone on the color of their skin. It’s impossible. Because even when it was not my opinion we are created equal, God, science and nature kept proving to me that we are not better than each other. It proved to me we are complete equals,” Meeink said.
Meeink was generously afforded opportunities that turned into a career in marketing for the National Hockey League. Including some film work, his multitude of public engagements and upcoming projects, Meeink makes it his job to spread a different kind of movement that troubled youths can be a part of.
“I live by my reputation and my character. My reputation is what I want you to think of me. My character is what do I think of myself,” Meeink said. “If we can all live by character, we are all in a better place.” SPR
50336519
50336524
