North Carolina's Speaker Ban - A distorted legacy?

Let's go back to the Sixties, man, and see how we're not remembering it very well

Now that UNC Chapel Hill is in the news, this sounds like a good time to remember another contest in which that campus was involved. I refer to the Speaker Ban law controversy of 1963-1968, and the monument it got on campus.

I’m going to look at one specific thing - the monument erected a few years ago on the campus wall, near the point on the Franklin Street sidewalk where speaker-ban protests were held in 1966. (UNC’s Web site has information and plenty of resources for anyone wishing to explore further).

This is quoted from the monument:

THE SPEAKER BAN 

ALONG THIS WALL IN MARCH 1966, UNC STUDENTS 
CHALLENGED A STATE LAW THAT REGULATED 
WHO COULD SPEAK ON UNC CAMPUSES. 
THE STUDENTS LISTED BELOW INVITED BANNED 
SPEAKERS HERBERT APTHEKER, A RADICAL HISTORIAN 
AND FRANK WILKINSON 
A CIVIL LIBERTIES ACTIVIST 
WHEN STUDENTS WERE PREVENTED FROM HOLDING 
THESE EVENTS ON CAMPUS, THEY INITIATED A / LAWSUIT THAT OVERTURNED THE "SPEAKER BAN" 
IN 1968. 

To discuss why this is not fully correct or at least omits key context - we’ll have to go back to the origins of the controversy.

At the very end of its session in 1963, the North Carolina General Assembly passed a law banning visiting speakers from state-funded universities and colleges if the speaker was “a known member of the Communist Party,” was “known to advocate the overthrow of the” federal or state constitutions, or had ever taken the Fifth about “communist or subversive connections, or activities.” Governor Terry Sanford didn’t like the law, but North Carolina governors didn’t have veto powers then.

As far as we can piece together, the statute had a couple of causes. First were the civil-rights demonstrations rocking the state at the time. Legislators were a bit vague on the distinction between civil-rights activists and Communists, so they thought a ban on Communist and similar speakers could dampen the demonstrations. Also, a small group of Maoist Communists (who thought the regular kind of Communist was too tame) had been active on the UNC-Chapel Hill campus, inviting the head of their organization to speak on campus, as well as bringing a black criminal defendant they thought was being railroaded by capitalism (long story there). The broadcaster (and future Senator) Jesse Helms denounced the Chapel Hill campus for giving haven to these radical activities.

The law applied to the University itself - which back then was limited to UNC Chapel Hill, NC State (Raleigh), UNC Greensboro, and (during the latter part of the controversy) UNC Charlotte. The law also applied to campuses not then part of the university system - like the old teachers’ colleges. The main effect, though, seemed to be on the University proper. So the monument, which mentions only the application of the ban to the University, is anachronistic - only later did the University expand to those other campuses.

The practical effect of the law was broader than the legislature may have thought. Scientists and scholars from abroad, some from Iron Curtain countries and some of them Western radicals, were barred from speaking at the University system. And some domestic agitators were also banned.

Under the leadership of UNC system President William C. Friday, university administrators worked against the Speaker Ban, at first quietly and later more openly. They resented legislative meddling in university governance, resented the implication that the university was soft on radicals. Finally, they held to old-style liberal free expression principles - that faculty and students should have the same right to invite a Communist to speak as they had to invite a Democrat.

In 1965 the regional accrediting agency suggested UNC’s accreditation (and that of the smaller colleges) was in danger because the legislature had been interfering with matters properly reserved to the Trustees.

Governor Dan K. Moore then arranged the appointment of a Speaker Ban Law Study Commission to study the whole controversial issue and hopefully work out a solution which would limit Communist influence while keeping the accreditation threat at bay. The Commission held several public hearings and private consultations.

Friday and his UNC allies proposed to the Commission that the legislature return to the trustees their pre-1963 authority over visiting speakers. In return, the University would monitor visits by extremists to make sure that (for example) the speakers answered audience questions and were balanced out by people of contrary views.

Since this policy would allow any communist to be invited to campus, the Study Commission rejected it. They were more interested in a proposal coming from East Carolina College (soon to be East Carolina University) in Greenville, under the leadership of the politically-astute President Leo Jenkins. ECC leaders offered a compromise which the Commission picked up on. The previously-banned speakers, ECC suggested, should sometimes be allowed to come to campus, but only if their appearances were rare, for educational purposes and not for agitation.

So the Commission offered a deal to the trustees of UNC and the state colleges: Accept East Carolina’s proposed policy and, in exchange, resume their authority over visiting speakers. The various trustees, including those at UNC, plus the state legislature accepted this compromise. The legislature, in special session, empowered the trustees to allow the previously-barred speakers under conditions specified by the trustees - though in reality the conditions had been spelled out by the Commission. The accrediting agency accepted this compromise, and most people thought the matter was settled. At UNC, at least, the plan was to allow Communist speakers under the hope that they would be rare and that the experience of hearing them would be educationally valuable - thus conforming to the new policy.

In this context, inviting a “radical historian,” as such, would not have been a problem. The problem, which the monument doesn’t make clear, is that Herbert Aptheker had baggage beyond, say, his history of slave revolts. Aptheker was an open Communist who wrote Party apologias as well as history. He had been singled out at the Commission hearings as an example of the sort of radical who should not be allowed to speak. A Communist-for-the-FBI had testified to the Commission that Aptheker had advocated revolution when he appeared at Chapel Hill in the 1950s (which UNC officials denied). After the new speaker policy was adopted, Aptheker made himself even more objectionable by visiting North Vietnam with some peaceniks and lending himself, even more fully than the others, to supporting Communist propaganda against the United States forces fighting in Vietnam.

It was precisely because of Aptheker’s radical Communist activities that campus activists - first the Students for a Democratic Society and then more mainstream groups - issued an invitation to Aptheker to speak on campus. This was an attempt to destroy the Speaker Ban altogether by inviting a truly out-there speaker, hopefully having him banned, and then getting a court decision against the ban.

Another invitee was Frank Wilkinson - who was a “civil liberties activist” just like the monument states, though there was more context to this. Although he was cagey about it at the time, Wilkinson was in fact a Communist, as he later admitted to his biographer. Wilkinson sought to rally a broad civil-liberties coalition against the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), the Communist-hunting Congressional panel which had sent Wilkinson to prison for not answering questions about his activities. Though he hadn’t taken the Fifth when in front of HUAC, Wilkinson had done so earlier, in a California court, so he was covered by the Speaker Ban law. Herbert Hoover’s FBI had an extensive dossier on Wilkinson, and tried to discourage universities (like UNC) from having him on campus, as Wilkinson mounted a speaking tour against HUAC. (HUAC, by the way, was valiantly struggling to regain the relevance it had possessed in previous decades, and it got a boost by being assigned an investigation of the Ku Klux Klan rather than its usual Communist targets.)

The attempt at inviting Aptheker and Wilkinson provoked indignation and cries of betrayal from middle-of-the road politicians who had stuck their necks out to reform and water down the Speaker Ban. If their reform bill was used to bring the likes of Aptheker and Wilkinson to speak on campus, their opponents would cite it as proof of naivete or worse about Communism and of UNC’s alleged softness on Reds.

The Trustees froze the invitations, then empowered the campus heads (Chancellors) on each campus, after consulting an advisory committee, to rule on proposed student invitations to people covered by the Speaker Ban. For the proposed invitations to Aptheker and Wilkinson, this meant passing the hot potato to Chapel Hill Chancellor Joseph Carlyle Sitterson (himself a historian), who sorrowfully considered himself bound to issue bans, and did so.

After duly-staged on-campus confrontations, Aptheker and Wilkinson were obliged to leave the campus. They addressed crowds of interested students from the city sidewalk. Student leaders had thus prepared the ground for a lawsuit (with behind-the-scenes help from President Friday, who was just as interested as the student activists in getting rid of the Speaker Ban once and for all).

While waiting for a three-judge federal court to rule on the Speaker Ban case, UNC students and faculty began bringing in previously-banned speakers - at the Raleigh campus, the head of the North Carolina Ku Klux Klan got an invitation (the Ban applied to him because he’d invoked the Fifth in front of HUAC). The Klansman declined to come - maybe because he was distracted by legal troubles.

In 1968, the federal three-judge panel ruled the Speaker Ban unconstitutional. The terms of the law were too vague - which was the Communist Party, for example, and how would such affiliation be “known”? The judges vaguely suggested that the University could still act against Communists, but the University didn’t take up this offer. Instead, it began hosting communists and other extremists on the same terms as other speakers.

Traditionally, UNC has cited the Speaker Ban dispute as a victory for academic freedom and university self-government. People at the University have tended to be proud of their free-expression tradition, but who knows how long that historical memory will last?

Note - The image which goes with this article is provided for free, on condition the owner gets credit - see the Wikimedia Commons link.