Speaking Back by Speaking Up
It was not an uncommon sight. Rallies and protests are held by students at both the steps of South Building and the steps of Wilson Library, depending on the time of day the rallies are scheduled and how many attendees they will have. South Building, where the University’s administrative offices are housed and where rallies that feel critical in their moment often happen, is also one of the oldest structures on campus, a relic of the University’s history as an institution that served the young sons of North Carolina’s white elite until the early twentieth century. The choice of this location, in front of the building that campus architectural historian John V. Alcott called “the only visible member of the old University, [which] looks down the mall with Olympian authority of ruling function at ruling place,” was undeniably metaphoric.[1]
The rally was a show of solidarity for the student movement, Concerned Student 1950 at the University of Missouri, which that week had successfully brought the resignation of the University’s president after members of the Missouri football team had gone on strike, threatening to boycott their next home game. Catalyzed by protests in Ferguson, Missouri in the fall of 2014 following the shooting of teenager Michael Brown, black students at the University of Missouri began protesting against the racism and discrimination they saw as part of their campus culture, which they recognized in part in certain names on their campus’s buildings that honored former state political leaders who were also slaveholders. But the resignation of the University’s president had been one of the activists’ main demands. The resignation signaled that the administrators at the University of Missouri were willing to recognize student demands and open their campus to a new dialogue that allowed for critique of the institution.[2]
At the University of North Carolina too, in 2014, students in a group called The Real Silent Sam Coalition had renewed a decade-long protest for removal and contextualization of the University’s Confederate monument and the names on campus buildings that memorialize former state leaders, many of whom were active in white supremacist and segregationist political campaigns. In May of 2015, after a year of widely-supported and vigorous protest, the University’s Board of Trustees agreed to change the name of Saunders Hall--named for William Saunders, both a former Grand Dragon of the North Carolina Klu Klux Klan and North Carolina’s Secretary of State--to Carolina Hall. After a year of protest and struggle, students had received a building with a name scrubbed of meaning, an absence of contextualization about the name change, and then, finally, a sixteen-year moratorium on action about renaming other buildings. For many activists in the Real Silent Sam Coalition, the work of raising awareness about the racialized history of spaces on campus was as much about changing the campus culture of institutionalized racism as it was about changing building names.[3]
At Missouri, it seemed, students had been able to animate social change on their campus, where as it seemed at UNC, students had been dismissed and received a pat on the head in the form of a building’s name change. The rally in November was as much of a stand of solidarity with Concerned Student 1950 as it was a chance to coalesce around the frustration and anger students felt about the way the University treated different campus communities. As each student approached the microphone to speak, often building on or echoing stories that previous speakers had shared, the themes of exclusion and suppression became clearer and clearer. Students spoke candidly about the lack of academic and community support they felt from the University’s administration and about the stress that accompanied the isolation of their campus experience. Several students prefaced their remarks by saying “I wasn’t going to come up and talk today, but I have had enough.” From the crowd, other students yelled out: “Yes! Speak! Tell them!”
I stood in the crowd in November and listened, trying to piece together each student’s story into a narrative about exclusion and suppression on campus. My role was to listen and to learn, actions I should know well as an oral historian. The night before, I had hurried out of my last class to make it to the last half of the meeting to organize the logistics of this rally, where I kept silent, listening to learn, quieting a desire to share my opinions, my beliefs. But the next day and even now I am fighting an impulse to be able to tell a story from this experience. And I am failing: I heard a story. It was about the ability to speak and to be heard on campus, about the desire to push the University community to have difficult conversations about itself, and about an unwillingness to accept that political powers beyond Chapel Hill can determine who can be a part of the University’s community. I looked down at my watch. I was supposed to meet a student for office hours in a few minutes. I turned from the crowd and made my way back across that quad to my building.
From up in a tree on Franklin Street, the main thoroughfare of Chapel Hill in 1966, you could look down and across McCorkle Place, the other of the two main quads of the University. Students travel across diagonally here too, but in this quad, there are more visitors, wandering onto campus past the stone wall boundaries after lunch or a coffee on Franklin Street. It is the least populated and most public part of the campus. On Wednesday, March 2, 1966, though, if you looked out from one of the trees along Franklin Street, as Jock Lauterer, a photographer for the campus newspaper, The Daily Tar Heel, did, you would have seen a crowd of students, dressed in suits and ties, sitting on the green of the quad listening to an older man speak. The crowd of approximately 1,200 students, all white, mostly male, sat in front of a sign that read “Dan Moore’s Chapel Hill Wall,” which leaned against the dividing stone wall that separates Franklin Street from campus. Students sat quietly and listened to the man, Frank Wilkinson, executive director of the National Committee to Abolish the House Un-American Activities Committee, speak. “I have come here in good faith,” he said, “to state my point of view and to be put to question by you. I hope that out of this effort that we will be able to restore academic freedom to this University and to this state.”[4]
Again, it was not an uncommon sight. In the few years before, Chapel Hill had been the site of a series of direct action civil rights protests that involved some of the University’s students, frightening white conservatives across the state. Many blamed the protests on increased communist infiltration in the University. The week before Wilkinson’s talk, over 1,300 students had gathered in nearby Memorial Hall to assemble a large group in opposition against what became known as the Speaker Ban. For three years, the campus had been subject to an unconstitutional law from the North Carolina General Assembly, under which no publicly funded college and university could permit use of the campus by a speaker who was a known communist, had advocated the overthrow of the United States or North Carolina Constitutions, or had previously pled the Fifth Amendment. Having Wilkinson speak over the stone wall highlighted the absurdity of drawing a boundary that delineated where a person could legally speak and not speak. The choice of this location was intentionally humorous, but it was also key to the lawsuit that students would soon bring against the University’s administration to retrieve their right to free expression.[5]
Wilkinson’s speech across the wall spoke to students’ belief that the Speaker Ban law was a punishment from conservative factions in the state for their involvement in protests that demanded equality for black citizens in Chapel Hill. His speech on campus described the unconstitutional exclusion exercised on members of the Communist Party through McCarthyist practices and argued for rigorous protection of the First Amendment. Through student action and a willingness to hold debates on issues of race and racism, exclusion and marginalization, free expression and suppression, the law was overturned by a state court and the right to free speech returned to campus.[6]
In 2015, after I had left the rally and met with the student in office hours, I sat in my office and listened to interviews I had done years earlier with members of the student organizations that brought the lawsuit against the University. Alongside each interviewee and alumnus, I watched the Wilkinson speech: I sat in the grass next to my roommate; I stood right behind Wilkinson on the sidewalk, keeping my eye on the crowd for any sudden movements; I sat in the crook of a branch in a tree and photographed the crowd. As I had done an hour earlier, I could not stop at just listening. I was hearing a story. It was about the ability to speak and to be heard on campus, about the desire to push the University community to have difficult conversations about itself, and about an unwillingness to accept that political powers beyond Chapel Hill can determine who can be a part of the University’s community.
This project is an experiment in using a digital format to explore these two eras of student activism and their intersection: how do oral histories with members of a student movement for free speech on the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s campus in the 1960s resonate in a contemporary era of student activism around racism and inclusion? Interviewees in this Speaker Ban collection speak to the importance of maintaining the courage of your convictions against a disengaged University administration, the logistics of gathering a diverse collection of student organizations and interests in collective action for one cause, and a deep understanding of their connectedness to place, both to the University and as part of a national network mobilizing students for social change. In an analysis of a few of the interviews in this collection and a discussion of the complexities of contemporary critiques of free speech activism as race avoidance, I draw from these themes of conviction, organization, and place to understand the present struggle. While the two eras of student activism appear to be dissimilar, even perhaps contradictory--one, ostensibly, about communism and free speech, the other about marginalization and racism--the student activists of the 1960s offer possible paths to sustained and successful action for today’s activists.
This project is also an opportunity for a personal reflection on the digital and oral historian’s ability to use their methods as a partisan tool for change, on campus and in themselves. I identify as white and female, an oral historian and digital historian, an alumna and current student of the University, and I feel comfortable in these self-identifications. More hesitantly, I am trying to identify as an activist and to view myself as a participant working towards the goal of making my University’s community inclusive for all persons. This project is an attempt to understand how these aspects of my identity work for and against each other. To this end, I use the historian Martin Duberman’s, provocation at the beginning of his study of Black Mountain College, another North Carolina institution:
I will be present in this work, revealing my processes, anxieties, and reflections with an interpretation of my research and methods. My hope is that by writing my experiences and feelings into this project, I can better explore the exchange of ideas across the two different eras of student activism.[7]“My conviction is that when a historian allows more of himself to show—his feelings, fantasies and needs, not merely his skills at information-retrieval, organization and analysis—he is less likely to contaminate the data, simply because there is less pretense that he and it are one.”
I use Scalar to approach the topic of free speech as a mirror to my own methods, and as a way to offer multiple narratives about campus activism, oral history practice, and self-identification as an historian-activist to proliferate through the multiple connections between subjects. Scalar’s allowance for a non-linear structure invites divergent readings of the intersection between the two different eras of activism. There is no wrong way to travel forward or backwards through the project; connections between paths are a beginning attempt to maneuver between questions of self, activism, oral history, digital scholarship, and free speech. Because there is no one way to move through the project, users are given the opportunity to explore the two eras alongside an examination of the historian’s process. In this way, this project offers the possibility that the user can become the historian if the historian can build a relationship with their methods, subject, and format in which scholarship and process are examined as equals alongside an engaged and critical reflection of the historian themselves.
[1] Alcott, John V., The Campus at Chapel Hill: Two Hundred Years of Architecture, Chapel Hill, NC: Chapel Hill Historical Society, (1986), 67-8.
[2] Huguelet, Austin, “Student President on Missouri’s History,” The New York Times, November 9, 2015, Video.
[3] Brown, Blanche, Personal Interview, April 15, 2015.
[4] Frank Wilkinson Speech, March 2, 1966. McNeill Smith Papers, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
[5] Interview with Jim Medford by Anna Faison, February 28, 2013, in the Southern Oral History Program #4007, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
[6] Frank Wilkinson Speech, March 2, 1966. McNeill Smith Papers, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
[7]Duberman, Martin, Black Mountain: An Exploration In Community, New York, New York: W.W. Norton, (1972), xviii.
