Philadelphia Inquirer Investigates Frank Sherlock's Former Membership in Skinhead Band

At the Philadelphia Inquirer, Jason Nark writes about revelations concerning Frank Sherlock's former ties to white nationalism, as a member of a skinhead band, New Glory, from 1988-1989. Sherlock served as the second poet laureate of Philadelphia from 2014-2015 and was awarded a Pew Fellowship in 2013. Nark writes:

On the last day of January 2014, Frank Sherlock stood at a lectern at City Hall, read his poem celebrating the toughness of a black woman from Point Breeze, and shook the hand of then-Mayor Michael Nutter.

Sherlock was named Philadelphia’s second poet laureate that day, succeeding activist Sonia Sanchez. With a long, salt-and-pepper beard at age 44 and a trademark scarf, he looked the part of a bard. Decades before that Friday afternoon, though, Sherlock was a 19-year-old skinhead, expressing himself in vastly different ways as the vocalist for the band New Glory.

“We are white nationalists," Sherlock, who went by “Fran” at the time, told a British zine in 1988. “Subsequently, we hold our beliefs of white power for white people. The Aryan people must forge their own destiny, free from the rule of an alien occupational government that serves no representation to the American white masses.”

On social media last month, the revelation that Sherlock, recipient of a Pew Fellowship in 2013, was once a skinhead tore through Philadelphia’s close-knit poetry community, then rippled out into wider circles, affecting nearly everyone who worked closely with him.

Defenders have said Sherlock’s redemption, his work with young poets over the last two decades, is being unfairly canceled.

Others say Sherlock’s redemption story reeks of privilege.

“As a white person, you get to say it’s a youthful indiscretion,” Rasheedah Phillips, a lawyer, artist, and “AfroFuturist,” told The Inquirer. “As a black person, the consequence for youthful indiscretion is lifelong poverty and jail.”

Read on at Philly.com.