In the 1970s, Rockwell Hall was a two-story, mostly red brick building with a wood-paneled front — the kind you might see on a tavern. The building was nondescript, except for a swastika emblem over the front door, right next to an American flag. A racist banner, large enough to see down the block, hung on the building’s west side.

In 1978, Larry Langford pulled his motorcycle up to the building, the headquarters of the National Socialist Party of America. Langford had come to cover a neo-Nazi press conference as a reporter for WIND radio. (These days he’s a spokesman for the Chicago Fire Department.)

“Some of my fellow reporters were looking at me like, ‘What are you doing here?’” he recalls. “I realized I was the only black reporter there.”

Langford says he gathered his resolve before entering the group’s self-described “barracks.” The hosts of the press conference were dressed in their version of a Nazi uniform: brown shirts, ties, and red swastika armbands.

“They tried to put on a little show for me. They were coming out of the back with guns and military side arms, putting them on the table,” Langford says, adding that apart from a few glares, he was able to get his story without incident.

It was Langford’s first time visiting Rockwell Hall, but the building was notorious in the 1970s, and the neo-Nazis who lived there made national headlines in the latter part of that decade. The group garnered enough fame that that they were satirized in the classic Chicago-based film The Blues Brothers.