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In this space, I will offer the occasional opinion column, and invite my readers—old and new—to respond. Please address all responses to me at pyoung3@bellsouth.net. At 5:30 p.m. February 6, the Friends of the UNC Library will stage a forum at Wilson Library on the infamous Speaker Ban of 1963. I'm a rare one who witnessed the bizarre passage of this notorious act. I sat alone in the press section on the floor of the NC House of Representatives that day. It was expected to be a non-news day, the very last of that session. The following tells my small part of the story in a column I wrote that was published July 1, 1995 in the Chapel Hill Herald. Perry Deane Young June 25th is a day that should be forever remembered in North Carolina, a kind of Pearl Harbor Day for those who truly believe in academic freedom. It was on that date in 1963 that a renegade band of redneck legislators suspended the rules of the General Assembly and within minutes enacted the infamous Speaker Ban. It was only a matter of minutes after that when ol' Jesse, the man we then dismissed as a minor nuisance and major right wing crackpot at WRAL, tried to get me fired from my job as a reporter for United Press International. I was a very young 21 when I dropped out of my junior year at UNC to cover the legislature for UPI. It was the most bizarre experience in my reporting career, which included years in New York, Saigon and the Middle East. The palace or circus-like white marble State Legislative Building was in use for the first time. All the good old boys from Podunk Sprangs were beside themselves in the plush new quarters, gadding about the exotic pools and palm trees like schoolboys in Disneyland. We took five overnight junkets, loading up the entire legislature, staff and press corps for bus and train trips from Wrightsville Beach to Cullowhee. But underneath all the superficial goodtimes was a dark undercurrent of racial paranoia and pure old redneck meanness. The all-white legislators did everything they could to suppress and ignore the Civil Rights movement, even when the demonstrators surrounded the building, their freedom songs practically drowning out the legislators trying to carry on as if nothing were happening. Even then, nobody wanted to be branded an out and out racist, so the rednecks were intensely frustrated about what to do. The breaking point came when two university professors--Al Lowenstein from N.C. State and Al Amon from UNC--were arrested during sit-ins. This was the real reason for the 1963 "Speaker Ban." In truth, the "ban" had nothing whatever to do with speakers at state-supported schools. It was a slap at the University at Chapel Hill in general and at President William C. Friday in particular. Most of those who have written about the speaker ban have missed the point, but William Link in his impressive new biography of Friday has it right. He puts the speaker ban in the context of the growing racial fears and anti-intellectual mood in response to the student demonstrations. Time and again, various legislators had told Friday he better get control of his students and especially his faculty. Time and again, Friday had quietly but firmly stood up for free speech and academic freedom. The Speaker Ban was the rednecks' way of telling Friday they were still in charge. The evening of June 21, Jesse Helms' pickle sour face came on WRAL and elaborately praised an Ohio law banning Communist speakers at state-supported schools. Miraculously, four days later, a similar bill showed up in the North Carolina Assembly. Because of all the junkets, this was already the longest session in history. And this was one of the last days. Nobody was paying much attention as the final details were wrapped up. Then, Phil Godwin and Ned Delamar asked for a suspension of the rules. I was sitting in the press section, which in those days was right on the floor of the house next to the legislators. My ears perked up as the bill was read. What the historians all miss about that day is that (like the McCarthy outrages a decade earlier) there were people who stood up to the reactionaries on the spot. Rep. Paul Story of McDowell County was the only one in the House. He said the bill was blatantly unconstitutional and reminded them a similar ban in Arizona had already been knocked down. The House Speaker gaveled down the opposition and the measure passed on a voice vote. I was incredibly naive, a true believer that truth and justice were the American way. I couldn't believe this miscarriage of justice was happening in my own beloved North Carolina. I left my seat in the press section and ran along with the bill and its House sponsors onto the floor of the Senate. As pre-arranged, the rules were again suspended and the president of the senate, T. Clarence Stone, ramrodded it into law. A successful businessman in Rockingham County, Stone had actually graduated from Davidson College, but you'd never have known from his behavior. In looks and demeanor, he was typecast for the role of intolerant redneck politician. Unlike in the House, there was a chorus of opposition in the Senate, but Stone chose not to hear or recognize anybody. In particular, Sen. Luther Hamilton, a distinguished old gentleman from Carteret, a proud UNC alumnus and member of the Board of Trustees, was yelling at the top of his voice, until he was red in the face. Only after Stone had declared that the ayes have it [they clearly did not], did he recognize Hamilton. "I just want to say one thing," Hamilton said, "what you have done is not worthy of the senate of North Carolina." Delamar, Godwin and their cohorts strutted about like bad boys who'd just pulled one over on the school principal. I rushed downstairs to the press room and with all the righteous passion of youth punched my story straight onto the UPI teletype, a wire that went to our New York and Washington bureaus, but also served newspapers, radio and television stations throughout the South. I wrote: "Reactionaries in the North Carolina General Assembly have ramrodded another censorship bill into law." (The day before, they had voted to censor programs on public television.) Well, Ol' Jesse must have been hovering over the UPI printer at the WRAL offices. Mind you, WRAL was UPI's biggest client in North Carolina. The story didn't even make it to Luther Hamilton's eloquent last line before UPI's regional office in Atlanta stopped it in mid-sentence. Jesse had called to protest not to my bureau chief, not to the regional office, but to the president of the company in New York. I would eventually work for UPI for a total of three years, but this was the first and only time I ever saw the company issue a "mandatory kill" on a story. It read: "Editors: Please kill night lead censorship and 1st night lead censorship. A new story will move this wire shortly. This kill is mandatory." What I will always remember is going by my bureau later that day and hearing my chief, Bob McNeil, still on the phone answer ing the bosses in New York. "But dammit, he's right. I know he shouldn't have used that word, but they ARE reactionaries; they DID ramrod it through." He looked at me and tried to deliver a reprimand, but all he could do was laugh and say, "you really screwed up this time." He had stood up to Jesse and our bosses, he refused to fire me. The next day, he gave me a letter of commendation for an excellent job covering a very difficult legislature. Not long after that I ran into Luther Hamilton after a trustees meeting in Chapel Hill. I told him how impressed I was with his performance the day of the Speaker Ban; and he could only shake his head at the shame this had brought to our university and our state. It would eventually cost millions of dollars to undo the damage done by the Speaker Ban. But it's heartening to know that in North Carolina, at least, we have always had a Paul Story or Luther Hamilton to stand up to our Jesses and Clarences. In Mississippi and South Carolina, they've had nothing but Jesses.
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