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Letters to the Editor
To the Editor:
In your issue of March 2001, Professor Gregg L. Michel writes in a review of William J. Billingsley's Communists on Campus that, in the course of efforts to remove the ban on "controversial" speakers, in 1966, at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, I was invited to speak there. This sentence follows: "More than two thousand students turned out to hear Aptheker rail against the speaker ban from a sidewalk on the edge of the campus after he was prohibited from addressing students on campus."
This misrepresents the episode. The facts are as follows:
In 1965 at the request of the North Vietnamese I was asked to visit the scene of the warfare, to come with two non-Party people, to see what was going on and to return to the United States hopefully to help end the war.
As a result, in 1966, Staughton Lynd, then a young professor at Yale, and Tom Hayden, a very young leader of the radical youth movement, went with me to North Vietnam. We were there about ten days and witnessed something of what U.S. intervention had done.
This trip excited great notice in the United States. When we returned the three of us—almost always separately—spoke where and when we could, urging that U.S. intervention in Vietnam cease. We reached millions of people and, I believe, helped in turning American public opinion against U.S. intervention in Vietnam.
My visit to Chapel Hill was part of that
effort. At the same occasion I spoke against U.S. intervention in Vietnam
at Duke University—with no difficulty.
At Chapel Hill there was great excitement.
I was met by ABC radio, and wires were attached to me. I went on the
campus, mounted the monument to Confederate soldiers, took out my manuscript,
and began to address a very large audience. At that point, a policeman
stopped me, asked if I was Herbert Aptheker, and when told the ominous
truth prohibited my continuing.
We—all many hundreds of us—proceeded
off campus and, at an adjoining walk, I attempted to speak. But I could
not be heard. At that point, a minister asked if I wanted his church
for my message.
We all—many hundreds—went the
short distance to his church (I do not recall the denomination). I mounted
the pulpit and offered my carefully prepared appeal for Washington to
cease its criminal war in Vietnam. I spoke perhaps 35 minutes without
interruption. There followed a rather brief questions period.
This was, I believe, a victory for free
speech. The entire effort by Hayden, Lynd, and me played, I believe
and hope, a small part in finally ending U.S. intervention in Vietnam.
Perhaps you will think it proper to publish
this clarification.
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Herbert Aptheker
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San Jose, California
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To the Editor:
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