“To Think and Act on Their Own”: Free Speech and Student Activism at UNC, 1946-1953

• In Event: Power, Policy, and Belonging in Higher Education

Abstract

This article explores a similar moment to our own in the history of higher education, when students became defenders of free speech and agitators for desegregation during the Red Scare in the cold war South. It centers on the experience of Richard Murphy, a senior at the University of North Carolina and head of the National Student Association (NSA), who was placed in the spotlight due a contentious debate with a segregationist member of the University Board of Trustees, John Clark. Despite Clark’s intimidation tactics and attempted crackdown on free speech, Murphy and his colleagues organized to defend student rights and agitated for undergraduate desegregation under threat of expulsion. Building upon the work of Ellen Schrecker and Joy Williamson-Lott, this article argues that students were not passive voices amidst the cold war crackdown on higher education in the early 1950s, rather, they were defenders of free speech and social justice.

Author

• Brendan Lee, University of Utah