By Hugh Stevens

Author’s Note: This article is adapted from an essay published in 2015 in connection with the 50-year graduation reunion of the University of North Carolina’s class of 1965.

In the late spring of 1963, when Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and other civil rights leaders organized anti-segregation boycotts and demonstrations in Birmingham, Alabama, I was an 18-year-old sophomore at UNC.

T.E. “Bull” Connor, Birmingham’s Commissioner of Public Safety, responded to the protests by ordering police and firemen to turn police dogs and high-pressure fire hoses on the demonstrators, many of whom were children. The shocking images of the violent confrontations that television brought into my fraternity’s chapter room hit me in my gut. For me – and, I now know, for many other white southerners – those images caused me to think seriously for the first time about something that up until then I had more or less taken for granted: racial segregation.

I was not the only North Carolina college student moved by the events in Birmingham. Galvanized by the images of youngsters fleeing from angry policemen and vicious, snarling dogs, students from Shaw University staged sit-ins at Raleigh theaters and restaurants, protested at the Sir Walter Hotel where most members of the General Assembly stayed during the legislative session, and swarmed over the grounds of the Governor’s Mansion while Governor Terry Sanford hosted the annual North Carolina Symphony Ball.

Although Governor Sanford defused the symphony protest by appearing on the south porch of the mansion and offering to meet with the protesters, some other prominent citizens reacted very differently. Jesse Helms, who was then an on-air editorialist for Capitol Broadcasting, saw the protests as evidence of Communist influence, especially at colleges and universities. In June he commended the Ohio legislature for proposing a bill to restrict speakers at their state’s public universities, suggesting that it “should also provide a lesson for the rest of us.”

On June 25, as the legislative session wound down, General Assembly leaders suspended the rules and rushed through what became known as “the Speaker Ban Law,” which prohibited the use of any state-supported college or university facilities by anyone who was a communist, who had advocated the overthrow of the U.S. or North Carolina constitutions, or who had pleaded the Fifth Amendment when questioned about subversive activities.

A motion to reconsider the bill failed the next day, and the legislators went home. Governor Sanford decried the law but could do nothing about it, because North Carolina’s governors had no veto authority at the time. 

I was barely aware of the law until shortly before I returned to Chapel Hill for my junior year, and even then it didn’t galvanize my attention like the great March on Washington, which occurred on August 28. Other UNC students, however, were quicker to recognize the potential damage done by the bill.  Mike Putzel, editor of The Daily Tar Heel’s summer edition, responded with a front-page editorial hailing the University’s legacy of free inquiry that allowed students to explore, question and doubt. “Whenacademic freedom is lost,” he wrote, “the heart and the reputation of the University are lost with it. This burden, no institution can be expected to bear.”

By early October, the Speaker Ban Law was very much on my mind because the editors of The Daily Tar Heel assigned me to research and write a series of articles explaining its history and potential consequences. The first article of the three I wrote began this way:

June 25 dawned as a bright and beautiful Tuesday in Chapel Hill – the type of day one traditionally likes to associate with the placid quadrangles and weathered bricks on the Carolina campus.  A gentle but humid breeze stirred the leaves of Davie Poplar, still the main attraction after 170 years.

In his office, Consolidated University President William C. Friday began a typical summer day.

In Raleigh, another of the Consolidated University’s campuses basked in the sun.  Down the street and around the corner, the members of the 1963 N.C. General Assembly were thinking about going home, for adjournment was imminent despite the fact that redistricting had not yet been considered.

Then, shortly before noon, a call went out from the State House to President Friday in Chapel Hill.  A resolution had just been introduced in the House of Representatives, and one of the most controversial stories of 1963 had begun.  By nightfall, the sunny day would become gray and dreary in the minds and hearts of many who love the University, and the gentle breeze would fan a bonfire of tension and anger.

Collectively, my articles described how the law had been rushed through both houses of the General Assembly without debate in the closing hours of the legislative session; how the motion to reconsider it had failed on June 26; how its existence intruded on the University’s academic freedom and threatened its accreditation; and how lines were quickly drawn between its opponents and its proponents:

In the offices of college officials the bill was lamented, in the state papers it was blasted, and in American Legion meetings it was virtually worshipped.

 In an observation that proved to be unusually prescient, the third of my articles pointed out that even if the General Assembly could be persuaded to repeal the law, no such opportunity would occur until the next legislative session, which would not commence until January, 1965.  “The only other real weapon,” I wrote, “is a test case in the courts . . . but such a move will come only as a last resort.”

Personally, I viewed the Speaker Ban as an insult; did Jesse Helms and his allies really think that I and my fellow students were so naïve and gullible that we could not be permitted to hear a “communist” speaker, lest we renounce our U.S. citizenship and work to overthrow the government?  I also understood, of course, that the law really was more about “sending a message” than preventing us from hearing one.

Because the General Assembly would not meet again for almost two years, President Friday and the Consolidated University’s Board of Trustees embarked on a strategy that involved educating the public about the law and its ramifications for academic freedom while simultaneously enlisting alumni, students and friends in the effort to urge its repeal.  They also rallied support from the state’s other colleges and universities, both public and private.

Meanwhile, legislators opposed to the law, including Democratic State Senators Lindsay Warren, Perry Martin and Luther Hamilton, and Republican House leader William Osteen, spoke out against it as a damaging and unnecessary attack on freedom of speech and inquiry.  My own State Senator, Ralph Scott of Alamance County, took the fight directly into the enemy’s lair, telling the state’s American Legion convention that under the law, neither Fidel Castro nor Adolph Hitler would have been prohibited from speaking on campus. “Castro,” he said, “has said he is not a member of the Communist Party, and he has not violated any of the other provisions.”

The Speaker Ban loomed like a cloud over our senior year at Chapel Hill. As co-editors of The Daily Tar Heel, Fred Seely and I wrote editorials decrying the law. More importantly, my position drew me into a wide and varied circle of students, faculty, administrators, alumni and others whose common goal was to remove the cloud from UNC’s academic reputation. The moral and intellectual leaders of the group were President Friday and Student Body President Bob Spearman. Anne Queen, who hosted frequent Sunday brunches at which the conversation was fueled by sherry and Bloody Mary’s, was our de facto social chairman; the regular attendees at her soirees State Senator Scott; Joel Fleishman, Governor Sanford’s administrative assistant; UNC law professor Dan Pollitt; Duke law professor William Van Alstyne; and UNC alumnus Jim Exum, who was then practicing law in Greensboro.

In addition to exposing me to such heady conversation and company, the Speaker Ban also led, unexpectedly, to my long friendship with Charles Kuralt. We met when Charles, who had been editor of The Daily Tar Heel in 1954, came to Chapel Hill in the summer of 1964 to do a story about the law for “The CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite” and we stayed in touch long afterward. Thanks to the Speaker Ban, we shared several lunches over the years at the Grand Central oyster bar and Café des Artistes, and Marilyn and I have fond memories of sitting in on live broadcasts of “Sunday Morning” at the CBS studios on West 57^th Street.

The Speaker Ban also led to my acquaintance with J. McNeill (“Mac”) Smith, the Greensboro lawyer and former DTH editor who, together with Professors Pollitt and Van Alstyne, filed the federal lawsuit that eventually resulted in the Speaker Ban being declared unconstitutional. By the spring of 1965 the effort to repeal the ban had come to nothing, so many opponents of the law believed that our only hope lay in a federal lawsuit, which Mac Smith volunteered to handle pro bono.

Although I was among the UNC students who had agreed to be named as plaintiffs, two factors delayed the suit.  First, I and many others of the would-be plaintiffs would graduate in June.  Secondly, and more importantly, the lawyers worried that the lawsuit might be dismissed for lack of “standing” unless the students directly challenged the law by inviting one or more prohibited speakers to the campus and having them turned away.

In June, shortly after Commencement, the situation was further complicated by the General Assembly’s creation of a special commission to review the law. President Friday and others felt that the ban’s opponents should give the group, which was known as “the Britt Commission,” the opportunity to do its work.

In November the Britt Commission recommended, and the General Assembly decided, that the law should be amended to make the University’s trustees and administrators accountable for enforcing a “speaker policy” that gave lip service to a diversity of viewpoints while simultaneously mandating that campus talks by anyone whose appearance would have been prohibited by the law should be “infrequent” and “rare.” By then I was in law school at UNC, Bob Spearman was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, and the torch had passed to another cohort of students.

In 1966, Student Body President Paul Dickson, DTH editor Ernie McCrary, and other student leaders forced the issue by inviting two avowed Communists, Frank Wilkinson and Herbert Aptheker, to speak on campus. When newly-appointed Chancellor Carlyle Sitterson barred their invitations at the direction of the Board of Trustees, Wilkinson and Aptheker made separate but equally dramatic appearances before large groups of students, faculty and other spectators who gathered near the stone wall near Graham Memorial that demarked the boundary between the campus and Franklin Street.  Both speakers stood on the sidewalk and addressed the crowds across the wall. Neither’s speech is memorable except as a seminal event that allowed the students’ lawsuit to go forward. Ironically, the 1965 amendments to the statute meant that the student plaintiffs had to name as defendants the very University administrators who had led the fight against the law, including President Friday. The students filed suit in federal court on March 31, 1966.

On February 19, 1968, a three-judge panel of federal judges declared the Speaker Ban Law unconstitutional. See, Dickson v. Sitterson, 280 F. Supp. 486 (1968).  The panel’s opinion includes a detailed recitation of the events leading up to the lawsuit. Because the plaintiffs and defendants effectively were on the same side, the decision was not appealed.

Several of the student plaintiffs in the Speaker Ban suit were personal friends, and some who survive still are. (Their names are listed on a plaque installed atop the wall across which Aptheker and Wilkinson spoke in March, 1966.) I would have been honored to have been among them, but in the end the most important thing to me was that in their misguided attempt to curtail UNC’s academic freedom and my First Amendment rights, Jesse Helms and his friends inadvertently provided me with the opportunity to understand and treasure those rights more deeply, to meet Mac Smith and others who became my friends and mentors, and to find my professional calling.