Gregg L. Michel | Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.4

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Gregg L. Michel | Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Communists on Campus: Race, Politics, and the Public University in Sixties North Carolina. By William J. Billingsley. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1999. xviii, 308 pp. $29.95, ISBN 0-8203-2109-5.)

In Communists on Campus, William J. Billingsley explores a fascinating episode in North Carolina history, the effort by the state legislature in the 1960s to prohibit political radicals from speaking at public colleges and universities in the state, particularly the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill (UNC). Although Communist party members were the ostensible target of the so-called speaker ban, Billingsley convincingly demonstrates that the state's conservative leaders drafted the law not because they worried about Communist infiltration of the state, but rather because they feared the growing civil rights movement. As the movement gained strength in the state, and as UNC students became a visible presence in it, legislators sought to use the potent yet malleable rhetoric of anticommunism to dampen support for civil rights at the school, thereby buttressing the political, social, and cultural status quo. 1

UNC's long-standing reputation for liberalism fueled anti-UNC sentiment in the state. Foremost among the university's critics were conservative legislators from the more rural eastern part of North Carolina, where segregation remained a powerful force, and Jesse Helms, then an influential and staunchly conservative television commentator in Raleigh. In 1963, the legislature imposed the speaker ban in an attempt to assert conservative control over UNC. . . .

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