Go to Hell, Duke?
My colleague, Doug Clark, blogged the other day about Ann Coulter, freedom of speech and, in a flashback to his days as an undergrad at Carolina, the erstwhile Pied Piper of the KKK, David Duke.
Doug laments that a group of protesting students prevented Duke from speaking in 1974 at UNC's Memorial Hall. I was one of them.
Here is my account of that night, reprinted from a column I wrote in 2002:
NOW AND THEN: On doubting Thomas and dissing Duke
In the spring of my sophomore year, David Duke, Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, coolly approached the podium in Memorial Hall at UNC Chapel Hill.
He was a handsome, charismatic man, in much the same way that John Edwards is today -- dapper in a three-piece suit and impeccably groomed. It was as if the Klan suddenly had discovered Madison Avenue.
A sustained chorus of raucous jeers erupted from a group of mostly African American protesters. As he began to speak, the jeers grew louder, among them a familiar refrain, "Go to hell, Duke."
When the sound technician increased the volume on Duke's microphone, the hecklers followed suit.
I should know. I was one of them.
As it turned out, Duke did have his say that night, but not in Memorial Hall. After several vain attempts to outshout his critics, Duke retreated to a room in the Morehead Planetarium, where he addressed a smaller, more cordial audience. There, he likened black people to chimpanzees, assailed affirmative action and repeated his intentions to recruit on campus for the KKK.
The incident reverberated around the state and the country. Had we infringed on Duke's right to free speech? Had we squelched the free exchange of ideas on, of all places, a college campus, where healthy debate especially should thrive?
Flash forward to the spring of 2002. Five black professors in the UNC School of Law announced that they would boycott a campus appearance by Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. In a written statement they explained that Thomas "is not just another Supreme Court justice with whom we disagree. Since Justice Thomas's appointment to the Court, replacing Justice Thurgood Marshall, he has provided the critical fifth vote in a number of decisions that have set back the quest for racial equality and social justice in this country."
Editorialists railed at the irony that in a school that fosters intellectual debate, faculty would pass up that opportunity on the basis that they disagree with an individual.
These two events made me think about then and now, and whether a common thread connects them over the span of nearly three decades.
As someone whose profession is opinions and whose mission is, in large part, to provide a forum for diverse views, I have wondered over the years if I did the right thing back in 1974.
I wondered about it then, too.
You see, I wasn't exactly a campus radical at the time, nor were the friends who accompanied me. I had been in Air Force ROTC in an era when that wasn't popular. Further, I aspired to be a journalist. How could that possibly square with preventing someone from speaking?
Finally, the prospect of actually protesting terrified us. What if we got into trouble? What would our parents say? But somehow we felt compelled to participate.
It wasn't Duke's speech that we opposed; after all, the most convincing argument against his Neanderthal views was allowing him to voice them (he had not yet mastered the veiled references he uses today). We did oppose the use of our student fees to bring him to campus for what he billed unabashedly as a "recruiting trip."
Realistically, would Duke have netted any recruits in Chapel Hill? I hope not. And wasn't he merely pressing our buttons to ensure more publicity for his visit? Maybe. But on principle we decided that we wouldn't willingly invest in his hate campaign
As for Thomas, he appeared in several classes at Chapel Hill last week and delivered a speech that was closed to the public. Some students say he wasn't particularly stimulating, and that he did not directly address affirmative action, age discrimination or women's issues.
"I'm a little disappointed," one student told The Daily Tar Heel. "He likes to skirt issues, especially the most controversial ones." That may not have been the case if those five absent professors had showed and pressed him on his views.
It's no secret that Thomas is not held in high esteem among many black folks. An African American news magazine, Emerge, once portrayed him on its cover wearing a handkerchief on his head. But I'd like to have heard him. And I'd like to have challenged him.
I am not so sure about Duke. And I wonder, in retrospect, if we were unwittingly following the same dangerous close-mindedness that spawned North Carolina's infamous Speaker Ban Law of 1963, intended expressly to prevent communists from speaking on state-run campuses.
The First Amendment is a fragile, sacred thing. That has become even clearer to me during these trying, love-it-or-leave-it times when we seem to grow frighteningly less tolerant of those who would dare question or disagree.
Comments (7)
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My opinion you did excatly what a good liberal is supposed to do. Using your right of free speech, and hollering down anyone you disagree on. That is the exact reason I do not feel taxpayers money should be used to keep colleges in business. You proved it in your article above.
Clinton speeches were by invitation only, the dawg never got invited, Bushes by invitation only the dawg got invited. I have been to may speechs and have never heard a liberal shouted down. I go to speeches to hear the person, not to hear some spoon fed college brat to raise hell. Could it be that our moms trained us better?
Posted on December 10, 2005 7:03 AM
Sorry, you've got me on a roll this morning.
The same blacks/liberals/whatever that will fight for their right to demonstrate in the streets will fight to deny a white/conservative/Ann Coulter group their right to do the same.
Does that make any sense?
Is that tolerance?
Is that fair?
Hey, we're all Americans here, we have the same rights. When you seek to deny someone else their rights, you've diminished the value of yours.
And usually made an ass of yourself.
Posted on December 10, 2005 10:45 AM
Ann Coulter is an agent provocateur of the right and in responding to her in such a childish manner the students provide her with publicity and some measure of importance. She isn't exactly one of the conservative movement's intellectual heavyweights, more like a court jester. David Duke might warrant some sense of outrage, Coulter does not.
Some questions are in order. What exactly is threatened by Coulter speaking? What thoughts are so out of bounds that they cannot be spoken on a college campus? Who arbitrates who can and cannot be invited to speak? Some 18 year old with little life experience and less manners whose opinion is final because he can yell loudly?
The Brown Shirts stopped free speech by shouting down the opposition, tearing down their flyers, and burning their newspapers. Campus leftists would do well to remember that when they satisfy some sense of their own importance by such stunts that they aren't exactly in the best historical company. Coulter's balloon will deflate on it's on. All the students did was to keep it inflated awhile longer.
Posted on December 11, 2005 8:46 PM
Ten of us seniors spent $12 per ticket to see a Christmas Play Saturday night. Some young people had three outbursts of screaming and yelling.We where told they did this because they disliked a
person in the play.Where is our right to a rare night out?
Posted on December 12, 2005 7:06 AM
Well-said, Dudley. I agree fully.
Posted on December 12, 2005 12:19 PM
I had the opportunity to meet Justice Thomas on two separate occassions. One occasion was a rather intimate and informal affair at the home of Ted Olsen, the former solicitor general. It might suprise the disgruntled Chapel Hill student to learn that even among his conservative colleagues, Justice Thomas did not answer many questions about affirmative action or discrimination. He told me that he did not believe it was right for him to discuss his views on issues that were pending before the Court. This was before the Bollinger v. Gratz (University of Michigan) case was decided. This was also while the U.S. v. Virginia Military Institute case was pending. At the time, his son was attending VMI, so he had recused himself from that case. He did however, like to talk about the Dallas Cowboys and NASCAR (he's a big fan). We also discussed our mutual interest in cigars (he was smoking a Fuente). He is actually very thoughtful and interesting, but he takes his position very seriously.
Regarding the shouting down of Ann Coulter- I read a story on that incident where one of the protesters said he was there to shout her down because she was engaging in "hate speech". Whether you agree with Ann Coulter or not, she does not engage in hate speech. It is typical of college campuses these days for liberals to accuse any one who disagrees with them as engaging in "hate speech". This is critical race theory (which can also be applied to women's issues) to the extreme. Since when has hate speech been defined as anything that makes anyone uncomfortable?
I sat through many a liberal speech (including then First Lady Hillary Clinton) while in college/law school, and those of us on the right did not act like spoiled 60's rejects. I didn't agree with Clinton then, and I don't now. But I did go to listen to her, and I never accused her of engaging in hate speech simply because I disagreed with her.
I also sat through countless lectures by liberal college professors who relentlessly attacked all things conservative. Rather than protest and shout them down, I challenged them and engaged in a dialogue with them. That was the right way to do things. The Left does not know how well they have it on college campuses. It's a pity that too many colleges have become tolerant of the intolerance that is show to those who are not Left of center.
Posted on December 12, 2005 6:56 PM
By the way, David Duke probably doesn't need a crowd of people telling him to go to hell in order for him to get there. He'll probably do just fine on his own. He is an idiot.
Posted on December 12, 2005 7:01 PM