At stake, Murray believed, were the rights of all Americans to speak freely — including her fellow civil rights activists. It must operate equally in the case of Governor Wallace,” Murray wrote Brewster. In linking the fate of the civil rights movement to Wallace’s speech, she reminds us that the Constitution makes for strange bedfellows. By the time she arrived at Yale, Murray was an experienced activist and a disciple of nonviolent protest. Some years later, he asked the eminent historian C. Vann Woodward to lead a committee to examine free expression at Yale.

Source: New York Times November 26, 2017 23:48 UTC