EXCERPTS FROM FIRST AMENDMENT FELON:

On Alexander Meiklejohn and the First Amendment, Chapter 16:

Here is just a fraction of what [Alexander Meiklejohn] told . . . Senators in the stern but longsuffering tones of an aged professor (Meiklejohn was 83) addressing a group of cocky undergraduates who had failed to do their homework properly. It’s quoted here at length because Frank Wilkinson says reading it “changed my life,” and that was no exaggeration:

“The First Amendment seems to me to be a very uncompromising statement. It admits no exceptions. It tells us that the Congress and, by implication, all other agencies of the government are denied any authority whatever to limit the political freedom of the citizens of the United States. It declares that with respect to political belief, political discussion, political advocacy, political planning, our citizens are sovereigns, and the Congress is their subordinate agent….

“We, the people, who have enacted the First Amendment, may by agreed-upon procedure modify or annul that amendment…. We Americans, as a body-politic, may destroy or limit our freedom whenever we choose. But what bearing has that statement upon the authority of Congress to interfere with the provisions of the First Amendment? Congress is not the government. It is only one of four branches to which the people have denied specific and limited powers as well as delegated such powers. And in the case before us, the words, ‘Congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech,’ give plain evidence that, so are as Congress is concerned, the power to limit our political freedom has been explicitly denied….

“Whatever may be the immediate gains and losses, the dangers to our safety arising from political suppression are always greater than the dangers to that safety arising from political freedom. Suppression is always foolish. Freedom is always wise. That is the faith, the experimental faith, by which we Americans have undertaken to live….

“If men are not free to ask and to answer the question, ‘Shall the present form of our government be maintained or changed?’, if, when that question is asked, the two sides of the issue are not equally open for consideration, for advocacy, and for adoption, then it is impossible to speak of our government as established by the free choice of a self-governing people….

“No belief or advocacy may be denied freedom if, in the same situation, opposing beliefs or advocacies are granted that freedom. If on any occasion in the United States it is allowable to say that the Constitution is a good document, it is equally allowable, in that situation, to say that the Constitution is a bad document… If it may be said that American political institutions are superior to those of England or Russia or Germany, it may, with equal freedom, be said that those of England or Russia or Germany are superior to ours. These conflicting views may be expressed, must be expressed, not because they are valid, but because they are relevant. If they are responsibly entertained by anyone, we, the voters, need to hear them. When a question of policy is ‘before the house,’ free men choose to meet it, not with their eyes shut, but with their eyes open. To be afraid of any idea is to be unfit for self-government. Any such suppression of ideas about the common good, the First Amendment condemns with its absolute disapproval.

The freedom of ideas shall not be abridged.”

On Frank Wilkinson's last day at the Los Angeles Housing Authority, Chapter 7:

Since Wilkinson had been working in the slums since 1942, he was the Housing Authority’s expert witness. He knew all about rat infestation and the threat of another bubonic plague outbreak, as had happened in Los Angeles not long before. He had given similar testimony at nine previous eminent domain hearings. He was at this hearing to give humanitarian reasons why the court should condemn 28 acres for public housing in Chavez Ravine, a choice location near downtown Los Angeles. He had been testifying for two days at this hearing with no trouble.

But the tenth superior court hearing, on August 29, 1952, was doomsday for Wilkinson and the public housing program. He was in the midst of his usual spiel, answering questions from Felix H. McGinnis, attorney for two of the biggest development companies. Although Frank may not have realized this at the time, he had opened up to development this huge parcel of land, which had developers salivating. Suddenly McGinnis seemed to lose interest in rats and bubonic plagues. While Wilkinson was talking, McGinnis reached into his briefcase and brought out a dossier the FBI had put together on Wilkinson and some other LA Housing Authority employees. It had been given to Los Angeles Police Chief William Parker, who in turn had passed along the dossier’s juicier details to the leaders of the realty lobby.

Out of the blue, McGinnis asked Wilkinson to name all the organizations he had belonged to since his last year at Beverly Hills High School.

Always polite, though he was somewhat taken aback by a question that was no more relevant to housing than a question about his cholesterol level, Wilkinson started with his leadership role in the Youth for Herbert Hoover and kept naming religious, civic, fraternal and university organizations he had belonged to - and he had been quite a joiner. When at last he stopped, the lawyer asked, “Is that all? What about political organizations?” Frank, sensing he was being set up, conceded he might have belonged to other organizations. Pushed to name them, he refused, as a “matter of personal conscience. And if necessary I would hold that to answer such a question might in some way incriminate me.”

He was taking the disreputable Fifth.

What Frank could not have known then was that Chavez Ravine was slated to become LA Dodgers Stadium, and he was the mechanism.

On Supreme Court Justice Black's dissent in the Frank Wilkinson case, Chapter 24:

[Justice] Black, joined by Douglas and Warren said, “…it is clear that this case involves nothing more nor less than an attempt by the House Un-American Activities Committee to use the contempt power of the House of Representatives as a weapon against those who dare to criticize it. The dominant purpose in subpoenaing Wilkinson was to harass him and expose him for the sake of exposure.

“The majority does not and, in reason, could not deny this, for the conclusion is all but inescapable for any who will take the time to read the record. They [the Court majority] say instead that it makes no difference whether the Committee was harassing Frank Wilkinson solely for reason of his opposition.”

Then Black began to raise his voice in the kind of militant outrage he was famous for: “In the atmosphere existing in this country today, the charge that someone is a Communist is so common that hardly anyone active in public life has escaped it. Every member of this Court has, on one occasion or another, been so designated. And a vast majority of the members of the other two branches of government have fared no better.

“Thus, in my view…the only real limitation upon the Committee’s power to harass its opponents is the Committee’s own self-restraint, a characteristic which probably has not been predominant in the Committee’s work over the past few years.

“The result of all this is that from now on anyone who takes a public position contrary to that being urged by the House UnAmerican Activities Committee should realize that he runs the risk of being subpoenaed to appear at a hearing in some far off place, or being questioned with regard to every minute detail of his past life, or being asked to repeat all the gossip he may have heard about any of his friends and acquaintances, of being accused by the Committee of membership in the Communist Party, of being held up to the public as a subversive and a traitor, of being jailed for contempt if he refused to cooperate with the Committee in its probe of his mind and associations, and of being branded by his neighbors, employer, and erstwhile friends as a menace to society regardless of the outcome of the hearing.

“With such a powerful weapon in its hands, it seems quite likely that the Committee will weather all criticism, even though justifiable, that may be directed toward it. For there are not many people in our society who will have the courage to speak out against such a formidable opponent.

“If the present trend continues, this already small number will necessarily dwindle as their ranks are thinned by the jails...."

On Frank being subpoenaed in Atlanta, Chapter 21:

Frank had to hurry. He was due in Atlanta the next day. He packed, called Alan Reitman, associate national director in the New York ACLU office, to find out which ACLU lawyers he could contact in the South, and he was off to the airport. Arriving in Atlanta the next morning, he checked into the Atlanta Biltmore Hotel, and then….

“I go into my room, closed the door, and I hadn’t even opened my suitcase when there’s a knock on the door, and here’s this fifteen-foot tall marshal with a subpoena for me.

“I brought him into my room and asked, ‘How did you know I was here?’ He said, ‘I know nothing about it except that they called me from Washington yesterday saying you were on the way and they were sending a courier down with a subpoena for you and I’d find you at the Atlanta Biltmore Hotel this afternoon.”

FBI records later obtained by Frank’s attorneys show the Bureau almost always knew where he was.

On the University of North Carolina rally, Chapter 29:

In 1963, students at the University of North Carolina invited Frank and Herbert Aptheker, a leading theorist of the Communist Party, to come down and give some lectures. The state legislature responded by passing a resolution banning Communists or persons pleading the Fifth Amendment from speaking at state-supported schools. Aptheker, a devoted Communist, easily fell under the ban. Wilkinson didn’t. He had never been proved a Communist and had never taken the Fifth. But he was banned anyway.

UNC students (or at least quite a few) were embarrassed, for just up the road at Duke University, Wilkinson and Aptheker were welcome lecturers. How come those rich Duke brats had the fun of hearing radicals, but the children of mill workers and tobacco farmers didn’t? Complaints were actually put in those words. Student threats of a lawsuit prompted UNC trustees in 1966 to lift those restrictions and supplant them only with the requirement that speaking invitations be made by “recognized” student groups and that the invitation be approved by the school’s chancellor.

As soon as the ban was lifted, Paul Dickson III, student body president and chairman of the Students for Free Inquiry, invited Frank and Aptheker to come back. Frank did, and on March 3, 1966, he and more than 350 students and faculty members gathered outside the locked doors at Carroll Hall at 7:30 p.m. A university cop blocked the way; Chancellor Sitterson still hadn’t made up his mind about whether to approve the lecture. Well, said young Dickson, how about letting the crowd get in to hear one of Frank’s speeches delivered by tape recording? No, not even that. So the group marched three blocks to Hillel House, an off-campus Jewish Student Center, to hear him speak.

The next day, Chancellor Sitterson had made up his mind: The answer was No. Thereupon, Frank participated in his most picturesque demonstration of First Amendment uber alles. Since he was verboten on UNC territory, he stood on a city sidewalk bordering the university, giving his spiel to about a thousand students and faculty members who were standing or sitting on the university’s grass just a few feet away. Between him and his audience was a waist-high stone wall.

His short speech (the outdoor acoustics weren’t so good) was interrupted by applause five times. The event—his 132nd on a campus--ended the right way: He and young Paul Dickson filed a lawsuit to get Chancellor Sitterson straightened out.