The N.C. Scholastic Media Institute hosted a UNC icon and legend on Tuesday. And although it may not have been someone most student attendees were familiar with, he delivered a strong message.
William C. Friday, the first UNC-System president, encouraged high school journalists to take to heart Thomas Jefferson’s words, which are posted in Carroll Hall: “The press is the best instrument for enlightening the mind of man.”
“That’s the point,” Friday said. “To survive, a democracy has to have a free press. A university must have a free campus, free expression or it’s not a university at all.” Friday was giving a lecture entitled, “Crossroads on the Hill: Free Speech at Carolina,” to about 100 students and advisers.
His brief lecture and presentation focused on the 1963 speaker-ban law passed by the N.C. General Assembly, which banned known members of the Communist Party or those who had pleaded the fifth under oath about their possible communist activities, from speaking at any state-sponsored institutions. The law was ruled unconstitutional in 1968 after years of student activism and media attention sought to overturn it.
Friday grew up in Dallas, N.C., and studied engineering at N.C. State University. After graduation, he served at an ammunition depot in Virginia and later enrolled at UNC-CH School of Law. Following graduation, he became an assistant dean of students and eventually the fledgling UNC-System’s first president from 1955-1986.
That tenure put Friday squarely at the center of the free speech issue, which students protested about during the 1960s through marches, sit-ins and strikes as legislators wrestled with how to prevent ideas they didn’t agree with from being spread on the state’s campuses.
“Originally, there was virtually no debate about the bill,” Friday said of the speaker ban, officially known as an Act to Regulate Visiting Speakers. “I don’t think we realized the possible impact it could have. Our legislature didn’t take into account what this country really stands for,” he said.
“It was a convenient vehicle because everyone was against Communism,” Friday told the crowded room.
He recalled the turning point, the notorious appearance of two controversial members of the Communist Party, Herbert Aptheker and Frank Wilkinson. Under the speaker ban, they weren’t allowed on campus so arrangements were made for them to speak from behind the stone wall separating Franklin Street and the town of Chapel Hill from the campus. The law proved to be useless in preventing speakers from delivering their messages to students gathered on the campus side of the wall.
