A Narrative History of the Speaker Ban Action
The early 1960s saw a rise in direct civil action protests across the state, the most visible of which to state legislators were demonstrations held in Raleigh. In the state’s capital, the Raleigh Student Movement led protests and sit-ins at the legislative building and the Sir Walter Raleigh Hotel, home to many legislators during legislative session. These demonstrations were led by students from local colleges, including Shaw University, North Carolina Central University, and UNC. Similar protests occurred in Chapel Hill, organized by black high school students and white students from the University. Their means of opposing segregation included picketing and sit-ins, which gained national recognition in the wake of the violence the protesters met. State legislators, seeing students protesting in their workplace and former home (many were alumni of the University), were shaken by these demonstrations and saw students as the instigators. In the wake of the McCarthy era, in which anti-communist anxiety had blossomed in Chapel Hill, many blamed civil rights action on increased and continued communist infiltration at UNC.[1]
For many administrators and students, it was obvious the Speaker Ban law was a punitive measure against the University’s students, who had participated in the civil rights protests in Raleigh and Chapel Hill.[2] Conflating communism with integration was a common ideological practice of the era, which W. J. Cash explains in The Mind of the South: “The South was afraid on the score of the Negro and Communism. It was a silent fear for the most part…But there it was, real enough for all that, constantly adding fuel to hate and fanning the feeling of the need for more active expression of that hate.”[3] Passed in June 1963, the Speaker Ban law, or the “Act to Regulate Visiting Speakers” enacted that,
Although the language of the law explicitly dictated who could speak on campuses that received public funds, it was tied to the struggle for integration also happening on North Carolina’s university campuses. William Billingsley describes the goal of the law succinctly in his historical study of the Speaker Ban era at the University: “The speaker ban’s goal was to forestall social change, not communism.”[5]“No college or university, which receives any state funds in support thereof shall permit any person to use the facilities of such college or university for speaking purposes, who:
(A) Is a known member of the Communist Party;
(B) Is known to advocate the overthrow of the constitution of the United States or the state of North Carolina;
(C) Has pleaded the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution of the United States in refusing to answer any question, with respect to communist or subversive connection, or activities, before an duly constituted legislative committee, any judicial tribunal, or any executive or administrative board of the United States or any state.”[4]
The University’s administrators, including its chancellor, William B. Aycock, and its president, Bill Friday, were appalled to find the University’s academic system under the direct control of the state. Immediately, Friday and Aycock began to travel around North Carolina, giving speeches against the law. Friday expressed his opposition to the Speaker Ban, writing that allowing people to discuss communism on campus does not necessarily foster communism, but that “the free flow of ideas affords the greatest security against it.”[6] However, because the law was ostensibly an attack on communism and not on the UNC system, there was little support to be found outside of North Carolina’s college campuses. Over the next three years, Friday and Aycock attempted to work with the state’s government officials to overturn the law; when this effort proved unsuccessful, they worked to give responsibility for enforcing the law to the University’s administration (rather than the General Assembly) in order to minimize the possibility of a loss of accreditation from the Southern Association of Colleges and Universities.[7]
Though student action was not as swift as that taken by the University’s administrators, students were organizing to test the law before launching the formal assault that culminated in Dickson v. Sitterson. For much of the 1963-1964 school year, as students disagreed on whether the attempt should be made to either amend or repeal the law, the Speaker Ban was already being applied. The University was forced to rescind invitations from several speakers who fell under the constraints of the law including the playwright Arthur Miller, noted scientist J.B.S. Haldane, and the Leningrad Symphony. While these revoked invitations embarrassed the administration, they outraged many students, spurring discussion as to what should be done. Thus, while the school year passed into the next and direct action had not been taken by the student body, leaders from among them starting to rise.[8]
Early student leadership that would catalyze action largely came from two organizations: student government and Students For A Democratic Society (SDS). Paul Dickson, at twenty-five, was a great deal older than many of his fellow students, having already served a tour of duty in Vietnam. Even before he was elected student body president for the 1965-66 school year, Dickson was a large and present force on campus, especially in his outspokenness against the Ban. Pointing to his military service as the motivation behind his fight, Dickson argued that the United States was “fighting Communism in two areas: one on the battlefield, such as in Vietnam, and the other...the battlefield for men’s minds.”[9] His determination to eliminate the law sprang from his belief that hearing communists speak would convince his fellow students that communism was unacceptable as a political and economic system. His charismatic personality and ability to “attract people like a magnet and iron filings,” compounded with his “sense of commitment and wanting to see things changed for the better,” marked Dickson as one of the most important student dissenters.[10]Dickson acted as the intermediary between student government and the University’s administrative offices, while another student group was forming to directly challenge the law. The UNC chapter of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) was founded in direction opposition to the Speaker Ban law by Gary Waller, Jim McCorkle, Stuart Matthews, and Jerry Carr. SDS would prove to be key in pushing forward student action against the Ban whenever students reconsidered what actions they should take.[11] However, compared to the relatively traditionalist student government, SDS was considered too radical to be taken seriously by many students.[12] Although the group was small, with only twenty dues-paying members in 1965, SDS played an historically undervalued role in overturning the Speaker Ban, inciting controversy by directly inviting speakers, when other student groups were afraid to do so alone.[13]
Dickson, working with the University’s administration, became increasingly frustrated with their unwillingness to directly challenge the law despite their insistence that it threatened the University’s academic mission. In January, SDS informed the administration that they had invited both Frank Wilkinson and Herbert Aptheker to speak on UNC’s campus. Wilkinson, the executive director of the National Committee to Abolish the House Un-American Activities Committee who had refused to testify in front of the HUAC, and Aptheker, a member of the Communist Party and a Marxist historian, both fell under the constraints of the law. While neither Wilkinson or Aptheker had ties to North Carolina or the student action against the Speaker Ban, both agreed to help the students challenge the law. The University’s Board of Trustees, acting as the law required them to, rescinded the offers to both Wilkinson and Aptheker to speak on campus.[14]
Immediately after the revocation of the offers to speak, Paul Dickson, along with members of SDS, the Carolina Forum, The Daily Tar Heel, the Dialectic and Philanthropic Societies, the Carolina Political Union, and the Order of the Golden Fleece, formed the Committee for Free Inquiry. Each of these student groups held separate political and social agendas, but came together under the goal of overturning a law they felt to be unjust. The Committee’s objective was to mobilize students and faculty and to pressure the UNC administration to accept speakers on campus regardless of “their political affiliation or background.”[15] Through February and March of 1966, the Committee for Free Inquiry rallied students and brought Wilkinson and Aptheker to campus. Both Wilkinson and Aptheker were confronted by campus police, not permitted to speak on campus, and were moved across the stone wall the separates campus from Chapel Hill so that they could speak legally to the students. These speeches “across the wall” were the pinnacle of student action and provided much of the evidence for the forthcoming lawsuit.[16]
Following Aptheker’s speech, SDS again requested to have Wilkinson and Aptheker brought onto campus, and again, their request was denied. With this last refusal, the twelve students that had organized the invitations to the speakers had enough evidence to bring a lawsuit against Chancellor Sitterson, who had taken over as chancellor that year. Although the administration could be privately against the law, “they were worried about things that students wouldn’t worry about.”[17] And though Sitterson was named defendant, students understood he was “worried that what was going to happen was that [the students] were going to piss off the legislature so badly that they would take punitive measures against the University.”[18] The twelve students that had originally asked permission to bring Wilkinson and Aptheker to campus were the plaintiffs in the case that became Dickson, et al. v. Sitterson, et al.
Dan Pollitt and William Van Alstyne, of UNC and Duke University Law Schools respectively, gathered evidence for the lawsuit. Both Pollitt and Van Alstyne had argued from the law’s inception that it was flawed and would not be able to hold up under legal scrutiny. Pollitt was concerned that the law would be used to target faculty with progressive approaches to race and labor under the guise of accusations of communist connections. Over the past decade, there had been allegations against the University and its employees that were fueled by anti-communist sentiment, though the specific context in which these allegations were given was always undergirded by the politics of race.[19] Pollitt, therefore, felt he had a responsibility to the faculty to support students in overturning the Ban. Citing several precedents in which similar laws had been ruled unconstitutional, Pollitt and Van Alstyne were instrumental in orchestrating the speeches across the wall.[20] “Without the active support of UNC administration and academic community, especially the law school, this thing would have never gotten off the ground,” one plaintiff recalled.[21] McNeill Smith was a UNC alumnus and an advocate of human rights and equal justice, who took up the students’ lawsuit pro bono, collecting evidence and affidavits for the remainder of 1966. For two years, the Speaker Ban continued to be in effect on North Carolina campuses while many of the plaintiffs graduated and the lawsuit waited for its time in court.[22]
On February 19, 1968, three judges representing the Federal District Court in Greensboro decided the Speaker Ban Law to be “factually unconstitutional because of vagueness.”[23] However, the judges’ response gave hope to conservative lawmakers by expressing that “extremist” speakers did not further the educational experience, citing H. Rap Brown and Stokely Carmichael as examples. Because the language of the Speaker Ban Law appeared to affect only the right to free speech, the judgment made by the court seemed to uphold the political convictions of those who had crafted the law. The court did not cede to the plaintiffs that free speech was a guaranteed right on public university campuses or, more dubiously, that communist infiltration into the University’s student body or faculty was an absurd likelihood. Although it was disappointing to the plaintiffs that the judges had only found fault with the language of the law, not its constraints on the First Amendment, the Speaker Ban law had been toppled, largely through the dedication and conviction of students at the University. Although not enforceable for twenty-seven years, the Speaker Ban law was officially repealed by the General Assembly in 1995.[24]
[1] Ehle, John, The Free Men, Lewisville, N.C.: Press 53, 2007.
[2] 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.
[3] Cash, W. J., The Mind of the South, New York : Vintage Books, (1941), 319.
[4] “Act to Regulate Visiting Speakers: HB 1390, June 26, 1963,” William C. Friday Papers, University Archives and Record Services, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
[5] Billingsley, William J., Communists on Campus: Race, Politics, and the Public University In Sixties North Carolina, Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, (1999), 240.
[6] William C. Friday Letter to Ada Davis, July 4, 1963, William C. Friday Papers, University Archives and Record Services, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
[7] Interview with Hugh Stevens by Charlotte Fryar, April 11, 2013, in the Southern Oral History Program #4007, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
[8] Interview with Jerry Carr by Blanche Brown, March 1, 2013 in the Southern Oral History Program #4007, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
[9] Britt Commission Hearings, J. Gordon Hanes Papers, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
[10] Interview with Anne Dickson Fogelman by Anna Faison, March 25, 2013 in the Southern Oral History Program #4007, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
[11] Interview with Jerry Carr, by Blanche Brown, March 1, 2013 in the Southern Oral History Program #4007, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
[12] Interview with John E. Greenbacker Jr by Charlotte Fryar and Alexa Lytle, March 2, 2013, in the Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
[13] Mays, Glenn, “SDS Radical: ‘Going to Roots,’” The Daily Tar Heel, February 6, 1966.
[14] Memo, SDS to Acting Chancellor Sitterson, February 28, 1966, McNeill Smith Papers, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
[15]Billingsley, William J., Communists on Campus: Race, Politics, and the Public University In Sixties North Carolina, Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, (1999), 193.
[16] Interview with John E. Greenbacker Jr by Charlotte Fryar and Alexa Lytle, March 2, 2013, in the Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
[17]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.
[18] 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.
[19] Billingsley, William J., Communists on Campus: Race, Politics, and the Public University in Sixties North Carolina, Athens: The University of Georgia Press, (1999), x-xi.
[20] Pollitt, Daniel H., "Campus Censorship: Statue Bearing Speakers From State Educational Institutions," North Carolina Law Review 42 (1963), 179-99.
[21] Interview with John E. Greenbacker Jr by Charlotte Fryar and Alexa Lytle, March 2, 2013, in the Southern Oral History Program Collection #4007, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
[22] McNeill Smith Papers, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
[23] Order of the United States District Court - Greensboro, Records of the Office of Chancellor, J. Carlyle Sitterson Series #40022, University Archives, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
[24] University of North Carolina Report. Speaker Ban Folders. McNeill Smith Papers, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
