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On June 26, 1963, the North Carolina General Assembly passed the “Act to Regulate Visiting Speakers”, later known as the Speaker Ban Law. The law forbade known members of the Communist Party and individuals who had invoked the Fifth Amendment during congressional investigations from speaking on University of North Carolina campuses. Many students, faculty, and administrators actively opposed the ban, seeing it as an attack on free speech. In protest, students at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill invited Herbert Aptheker and Frank Wilkinson to speak on the edge of the campus. The university’s refusal to allow the men to speak on the physical campus was used as the base for a lawsuit, resulting in the 1968 overturn of the Speaker Ban Law by a U.S. District Court in Greensboro, North Carolina.
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