During Gastonia's Loray strike in 1929, Communist-led National Textile Workers' Union unsuccessfully attempted to unionize Gastonia's largest mill. Both William Friday and his father saw the strike as a "pivotal event," hardening lines against unions, but the younger Friday would later take his impressions of this experience with him into University administration, publicly defending the striking workers and the freedom of speech that they hold.

"Free speech" became something of a tough sell in the turbulent '60s when communism really seemed a threat bringing about a national debate as to whether communists should be allowed to speak on college campuses.

The Speaker Ban Law, enacted by the legislature in 1963 as the first measure of its kind in North Carolina to prohibit communists to speak on campus, became one of the first major challenges during Friday's presidency. Throughout his tenure, Friday battled diligently to get the Speaker Ban Law stricken from the University life. "I always felt that freedom is the basic lesson you have to teach every student," says Friday. Friday campaigned against the Speaker Ban Law and finally had to initiate a lawsuit to get the ban repealed in 1968.

The same year, during Richard M. Nixon's Presidential acceptance speech, he spoke of the widespread division existent within the American society, and pledged his support in the attempt to unify the country. Student activism became the norm, as campus groups vocalized the deficiencies they perceived in the American system: racism, pollution, capitalism, imperialism, and the most serious anomaly, the war in Vietnam.

On May 4, 1970, four students were killed on the campus of Kent State, marking an event where the most American students were killed in one incident (4), and the only incident where women were killed (2). What followed the Kent State massacre was a unprecedented national outpouring of anger and the only national student strike that went on to change the course of American history.

"Any institution that believes in student government in the sense of responsibility and freedom is going to be an institution that doesn't commit criminal acts." And I believe to this day that the reason Chapel Hill went through this experience so wonderfully was just that fact, to be free means you must act responsibly. No self-respecting university can call itself a first rate educational institution without the right of free expression. "

-William Friday
Biographical Conversations with William Friday.

The Racial Divide - War Time - The Fight for Free Speech
The Great Depression - The Dawn of Public Television
Education: The New Look of Education