This was 1965. We had the '63 session which passed it. Then we
had the Britt Commission in '65. The legislature said,
"We'll turn it all over to the Trustees of the
Universities and they will adopt regulations." The law was that
they will adopt regulations governing the speeches of known Communists,
those who plead the Fifth Amendment, those who advocate the overthrow of
the government by unlawful means. So they repeated [unknown] the language of the Speaker Ban Law and said there ought to be
regulations and that it has to be on rare occasions and only when
it's educationally necessary or something like that. So I
turned back to the Trustees. Well, immediately the SDS, Students for
Democratic Society, invited Apthecker to come to the campus. Aptheker
had been invited to the University of New York in
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Buffalo and they turned him down; they filed a law suit and he won.
He'd been invited to Wayne State in Michigan and while the
invitation was issued the Michigan Senate adopted a resolution urging
the President to cancel. Well, the President said, "No,
we're not going to cancel. This is a free institution and
we're searching the truth," and so on. So Aptheker
was known and his daughter, Betina Apthecker, was a leader of the Free
Speech movement at Berkeley. So she had been on the podium and in the
news and she had been invited to Alabama and Troy State and they turned
her away. They wouldn't let her speak, whereupon she became
someone you'd invite, so Herbert, the father and Betina, the
daughter were logical people. I talked to him on the phone. He called me
and he says, "I've got this invitation to come speak
there and if you just want a law suit, I'll come. But
I'm not going to go to jail. I'm not coming down
there to go to jail. I want that understood. So I'm not going
to violate any trespass laws or do anything like that." And I
said, "No, you don't have to." Hopefully,
you'll get permission. Well, the SDS then went to Chancellor
Sharpe. We had Paul Sharpe as our Chancellor then. He succeeded Bill
Aycock. Paul Sharpe was a good guy and he said, "Sure, be glad
to have him" He wrote a letter to Bill Friday saying,
"You ought to know that I told the students they could have
Apthecker. And what I'm going to do," he said,
"We need a senior professor to sit on the platform and there
has to be an opportunity for questions and there has to be a rebuttal
sometime in the not too far future." So those were the three
requirements. He was going to have Henry Brandis as senior
Page 11 professor to make sure that Apthecker doesn't
incite people to burning the old well or something. So Bill Friday
immediately told the governor.