Background of the Speaker Ban law and UNC's reaction
Friday describes the background of the Speaker Ban crisis. Beginning by emphasizing the University of North Carolina's precedent of honoring academic freedom, Friday explains how the Speaker Ban law was passed by the General Assembly in order to prohibit the presence of radical ideas from being articulated on campus. Friday argues that this policy represented anti-intellectualism and he describes the university's general opposition to the law.
Citing this Excerpt
Oral History Interview with William C. Friday, November 26, 1990. Interview L-0145. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Full Text of the Excerpt
- WILLIAM LINK:
-
I'd like to talk today about the Speaker Ban, and your
handling of that academic crisis. Let's start first by
talking a little about the background, before the law was actually
passed in June 1963. For example, what sorts of policy decisions have
been made towards speakers, at the University prior to 1963.
- WILLIAM C. FRIDAY:
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We had established the policy of academic freedom, which is the one
that's traditionally that of any major university in the
United States. In fact, I have looked at quite a few of them, they were
Trustees when they first qualified the code of the University had
carried forward in the laws of the institution. A very full and complete
statement about academic freedom that was drawn-up by Victor Bryant. The
idea there was to codify what was, at that time, a common law tradition,
so that everybody in any one of the campuses would know exactly where
they stood. What rights were there. What guarantees were there. And the
Board adopted that, and its in every document that I've seen
since then. I believe its still in the codes, if they didn't
delete it in the last three [unclear] . As
far as I know, we had been following all of the accepted practices.
Those were very tense times. As far as I have been toldߞnow,
this is all hindsightߞbut, what really went on here was an
accumulation of irritations. Not only speaker's, but a lot of
the things students were doing, at the time. The post-World War II
tensions, and anxieties that were in the air. The racial problem that
was so much upon us in the '50s. The Brown decision.
Petitions for admission to the University here. The undergraduate, and
graduate applications that went to court. All of those things created an
atmosphere that people who were a lot more conservative, and a lot more
anti-university. I don't mean that in a sense of anti-Chapel
Hill, so much, but anti-intellectualism. You see this periodically in
the country, about every twenty-five years. Well, they had been talking
among themselves, apparently, and of course, none of this got to us,
because they wouldn't let us know anything. And we had been
merrily going along through this session. And we came up to the very
last week, literally the last week, and I was sitting in my office one
afternoon, about this time, and I got a phone call from one of the
fellows over there from the Institute of Governor's State.
Said, "Did you know about this bill?" And I said,
"What bill?" And he read it to me. And I said,
"Read it again." And he did. And I said,
"I'll be right over there." And Fred Weaver
was working with me at the time. And I got in the car and drove straight
way to Raleigh. And walked in the lobby of the Sir Walter, and I was met
at the door, right at the main entrance of the lobby there, Hathaway
Cross, who was a lobbyist at that time, and he said, "What are
you doing over here?" And I said, "You know full well
what I'm doing over here. I came over here to tell you what
you were doing to the University, with this kind of
legislation." And Clarence Stone was then the President Pro-tem
of the Senate, and they had great irritation with me. They just dressed
me down for showing any resistance to it. And said I should leave this
matter alone. It's a legislative question and not bother it.
It was there business to set state policy's about matters
like these. Well, we got to work, and over nightߞand we worked
literally all night longߞto force a reversal of this, and came
within four votes of doing it. I think it was twenty-three to nineteen,
I think, the next day of the Senate. But the thing that was so bad about
this experience was, that here was a piece of legislation, that was
never filed in the traditional way. That the people were not given
notice of the law. There were no notices given to anybody that was
impacted by the law. There was no schedule of hearing about the law. The
rules were suspended. And the bill was enacted under suspension of rules
for three readings. All at the same time. A very craftily, engineered
piece of legislation, that swept through there. And we tried our best to
reverse it the next day. And came that close to doing it. But that was a
very bitter experience to have to go through. And then set off all kinds
of controversy. Faculty resolutions, all kinds of
student actions, and then the Board itself; especially the Executive
Committee, started debating this. We kept bringing it up all the time.
Trying to get a new policy. Trying to force a change here, because this
was a very humiliating thing to have happened. The difficulty here was
that you had to deal with people, in a legislator, who had enacted a
piece of legislation. And trying to get them to reverse something, as
openly and publicly approved, as this was. And it receivedߞnot
from the editor's of the State, but from the public general
news, American Legion and all of these people. It was their bill. Great
stuff. And it was a long and torturous journey, that led to a special
session, a special commission chaired by David Britt, about hearings in
Raleigh which, in terms of the University's statement of its
case, in my view, was as eloquent a day, as I've ever heard.
People like Vermont Royster, William Aycock, a whole parade of people
came from everywhere. And all of us made our statements. And all of this
was a matter of record, and special publication that came out, at the
time. And then they sort of tried to compromise. It became apparent as
this worked on, that the only way in the world that this was ever going
to end, was with a judicial decree. Because, the trustees, and
legislatures, and different administrative agencies can change policies,
that can do with or do without, but there's one thing nobody
can ask you to do, and that's to disobey the law. And, the
then president of the student body, by the time we'd come to
this point, a young man named Paul Dixon, and lots of people who are
strong liberal bent, didn't feel like we were prosecuting
this thing the way it should have been. But I was doing it in a way that
I couldn't talk about. And he, Dixon, kept me fully apprised
of every move he was making, so that we'd inevitably come to
a law suit. Because the Executive Committee, prior to that quite a
series of conversations had reversed and turned down a motion that I
made, and brought to them, which was the only time in thirty years that
the Executive Committee and the Board of Trustees ever turned me away,
so to speak. And that was quite a shock. And people like Watts Hill
stood with me. But Tom White, and the Eller's felt that they
couldn't do it, and they went the other way. And all of
that's in the Trustee minutes. It was a sad day. But I knew
then that I was faced with the problem where the Legislature had
expressed itself. And now here the Executive Committee and the Board,
had done itself. And they were pretty much in alliance, in a sense of
not completely negating the law, so the only recourse was the courts.
And Paul arranged the suit. Then came the situation down here on
Franklin Street, and the national humiliation that came from those two
men, being on one side of the rock wall, and several thousands of
students over on the other side of the rock wall, eighteen inches apart,
and the University was pictured all over America. As dramatically as
that was that day. I think, really the lesson that was learned from this
experience, everybody who was at fault in it. And there were literally
hundreds by the time it was over. And you've got to give
McNeil Smith a lot of credit here, for working with the students and
others. And I couldn't talk with him, butߞfor the
obvious reason. But, please note for twenty-five years since that
opinion, there have been people on the campuses on the University who
were far more contentious, in a sense of who they were as speakers, like
Louis Ferrankah, for example. And anybody involved in this series of
events leading up to the law. And I tell you, to be salutary that really
happened here was that everybody had an enormously intense, but very
lasting experience of learning something about freedom. They learned how
costly it is to turn it away. And how important it is to absorb it, as a
part of the way you live. Now, this had an enormous amount of momentum
that generated from all of the facultiesߞsome of them, not
everybody. The great and sustaining support from the press of the State.
The News and Observer, the Greensboro Daily News, the Charlotte
Observer, the Winston-Salem Journal, the High Point papers. All of them
rallied behind this. And it took us a long time to pull it off, in a
sense of getting it to litigation. Doug and I give McNeil Smith a lot
of credit for this. Although I've
never discussed it. And when that day came and the decision was
rendered, and we were put back to where we were, the University had
endured a crises that, I think everybody is stronger in, but its a
terrible way to have to learn. And I would hope never would repeat
itself again. There was an awful lot of work between the day of the
enactment and the day of the decision. And I've telescoped a
lot of it, but its so far back, that I can't recall
ߞ
- WILLIAM LINK:
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Sure.
- WILLIAM C. FRIDAY:
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..to much of it. But I do know those very difficult times.
- WILLIAM LINK:
-
Let me ask you, there are two things that I hear that you partly
mentionedߞyou mentioned these two things on writing your
explanations of the origins of the law, the passage of the law in June
1963. And one was the general atmosphere of ߞ
- WILLIAM C. FRIDAY:
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Accumulated animosity.
- WILLIAM LINK:
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Animosity and polarization that you got over civil rights.
- WILLIAM C. FRIDAY:
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That's right. Primarily.
- WILLIAM LINK:
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With all of the marches that were going on the streets.