North Carolina Speaker Ban
On June 26, 1963, the North Carolina General Assembly passed the Act to Regulate Visiting Speakers, later known as the Speaker Ban Law. The law forbade anyone to speak on a University of North Carolina campus who was a known member of the Communist Party, or who was known to advocate overthrow of the United States Constitution, or who had invoked the Fifth Amendment in respect of communist or "subversive" connections. The law was rushed through in the closing hours of the legislative session with virtually no debate.
To challenge the law, two speakers were invited to campus who were communists under almost any definition. When university officials refused to allow them to speak on campus, students from the university, led by Student Body President Paul Dickson, filed a federal law suit that ultimately declared the Speaker Ban Law invalid due to vagueness.
Read more about North Carolina Speaker Ban: Background, Passage, Criticism of The Law, Legal Challenge
Famous quotes containing the words north, carolina, speaker and/or ban:
“Biography is a very definite region bounded on the north by history, on the south by fiction, on the east by obituary, and on the west by tedium.”
—Philip Guedalla (1889–1944)
“The great problem of American life [is] the riddle of authority: the difficulty of finding a way, within a liberal and individualistic social order, of living in harmonious and consecrated submission to something larger than oneself.... A yearning for self-transcendence and submission to authority [is] as deeply rooted as the lure of individual liberation.”
—Wilfred M. McClay, educator, author. The Masterless: Self and Society in Modern America, p. 4, University of North Carolina Press (1994)
“The speaker in this case
is a middle-aged witch, me
tangled on my two great arms,
my face in a book
and my mouth wide,
ready to tell you a story or two.”
—Anne Sexton (1928–1974)
“It is cruel for you to leave your daughter, so full of hope and resolve, to suffer the humiliations of disfranchisement she already feels so keenly, and which she will find more and more galling as she grows into the stronger and grander woman she is sure to be. If it were your son who for any cause was denied his right to have his opinion counted, you would compass sea and land to lift the ban from him.”
—Susan B. Anthony (1820–1906)