Editor's note: In celebration of The Daily Tar Heel's 125th birthday, we are running excerpts from "Print News and Raise Hell" by Kenneth Joel Zogry. This excerpt is from pages 225-226 and 229-231. Books can be purchased via UNC Press.
In the span of a decade, the civil rights movement, the Speaker Ban Law, the sexual revolution, the rise of Black Power, the food workers’ strike, and the war in Vietnam all served to liberalize and radicalize significant numbers of UNC students, mirroring a similar transformation on college campuses across America. The Daily Tar Heel also became increasingly radicalized during the era, though most editors strove to provide a forum for all points of view. Quoting a nineteenth-century Chicago newspaper editor (and often repeated by former Tar Heel editor Walter Spearman, then teaching in the UNC School of Journalism), the masthead of the 1966 summer edition of the paper announced: “The job of a newspaper is to print news and raise hell.”
By the late 1960s, however, a conservative political movement represented by a new coalition within the Republican Party began to rise in prominence and push back against the liberal agenda. Following national violence triggered by racial unrest and antiwar demonstrations, Richard Nixon was elected president in 1968— only the second Republican to occupy the office since 1933. His campaign used slogans such as restoring “law and order” to what many conservatives saw as a society that had lost its moral bearings, and Nixon called his constituency America’s “silent majority.” In the South, where conservative white Democrats who felt betrayed by the pro–civil rights agenda of the national party were rapidly switching political affiliation, another group joined the fold: Christian fundamentalists. Soon to be labeled the Religious Right, these new Republicans focused on social and moral issues such as school prayer and abortion.
Despite UNC’s reputation as a bastion of liberalism, much of the student body and larger university community remained moderate to conservative throughout the 1960s. By the end of the decade, the political Right was well organized and energized by what was happening in the South and across the nation, and it actively opposed radical groups and initiatives on campus. The Daily Tar Heel, seen as a principal offender, was soon the target of this new conservative movement. Morality became the new Communism, as the battleground on which the Religious Right chose to attack liberalism became cultural as much as political. With witch hunts for closeted Reds passé, and attempts to maintain racial segregation a lost cause, the Right turned to stamping out what it defined as social permissiveness, including the breakdown of “traditional” values and the moral laxity brought about by the sexual revolution. Significantly, this marked the beginning of a difficult period for the Daily Tar Heel: a quarter-century of outside pressure and internal analysis that would eventually become a contributing cause of the paper’s separation from the university in 1993. In the 1950s, students and others angry over the paper’s editorial policies attempted to correct the situation by cutting off its proverbial head through special campus recall elections of the editor. By the late 1960s, many conservatives saw the paper as unfixable, rotten to the core, and beginning in 1969 a variety of attempts were made to greatly weaken its influence, if not shut it down entirely.
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On April 23, 1971, a full-page “Insight” feature story about being gay in Chapel Hill appeared on page three of the paper. Though titled “Homosexuality . . . has its problems,” the article was a remarkably frank and nonjudgmental piece for its time. In bold type, it stated: “The picture of the homosexual of five or ten years ago is changing. Today, homosexuals want to be accepted as people.” Accompanying the story was a large photograph of two bare-chested young men, their heads not visible, in a clearly romantic and sexually suggestive embrace. This was the proverbial last straw for several conservative students, who clipped the article and sent it to state senator Julian Allsbrook of Halifax County. The article, and particularly the photograph, deeply disturbed Allsbrook, who carried the clipping around the State Legislative Building in his wallet, showing it to any other member of the legislature he could collar. Soon Allsbrook introduced a bill into the Senate to prohibit student fees from being used to fund student newspapers on public university campuses. As he explained to the press: “I have been considering the bill since about two years ago when some students came to me and complained about articles in the Daily Tar Heel. Finally when the picture and story appeared, something had to be done about it. I thought it was as rank pornography as the public should be subject to. It is not the type of material that should appear in a paper, and I don’t think the students should be subjected to it. Students who do not wish this smut in their mailboxes should not be required to pay fees for these newspapers.”
Sensing another Speaker Ban in the works, UNC system president William Friday, UNC student-body president Joe Stallings, and Daily Tar Heel editor Harry Bryan mobilized to defeat the bill. Appearing before the Senate Higher Education Committee, Friday argued that it was best to “leave this kind of issue in the hands of the boards of trustees rather than subject it to statutory action.” Senator O’Neill Jones of Anson County called the legislation a “subterfuge to get the Daily Tar Heel and other college newspapers.” “These papers depend on the money from students to survive,” Jones said, adding, “They serve a good, useful purpose . . . I know a witch hunt when I see one, and this is a witch hunt.” Cooler heads prevailed, and the measure went down in defeat, 21–15. After the vote, Harry Bryan reflected on the situation:
If it had passed, it would have meant the downfall of the Daily Tar Heel. The Daily Tar Heel has produced some of the best journalists in the country in its 79-year history, and I would hate to see that stopped. . . . I believe Sen. Allsbrook would not have introduced this bill if he was in agreement with the DTH political philosophy. Because he is a conservative, and the DTH and most college newspapers are not, he tried to silence the papers that disagreed with him.
Over the years the paper has built up a reputation as a crusader in issues affecting the student body and, at times, society as a whole. . . . Attacks on the paper will continue, just as they will continue with every newspaper that stands up for what it believes is right. But as long as the DTH continues to speak out for the majority of the UNC student body, those who challenge it will not stand a chance of success.
