The state has entered the classroom: Academic freedom and a Cold War moral panic in Savannah, Georgia

In 1969, Armstrong State College suspended Professor W. Haynes Dyches after he was arrested in his classroom for allegedly sharing The Great Speckled Bird, an underground newspaper out of Atlanta, with young men in Savannah, Georgia. The criminal charge of contributing to the delinquency of a minor was eventually dropped after courts ruled that The Great Speckled Bird did not constitute obscene material. The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) alleged that Armstrong had violated the professor’s academic freedom by neglecting due process. The AAUP’s investigation revealed that Professor Dyches was fired because he was a member of Students for a Democratic Society and he was believed to have invited young men to his apartment. The AAUP added Armstrong to the organization’s censure list in 1972. The censure lasted a little over 10 years as Armstrong State College’s president, Harry Ashmore, refused to meet the AAUP’s conditions. Based on archival research in the Armstrong archives, the AAUP collections at George Washington University, local and student newspapers, and oral history interviews with Armstrong students and faculty, this case study illuminates the ways in which communities used Cold War moral panics about communists, gays, and lesbians to limit academic freedom and achieve political conformity in public higher education in the South during the “long Sixties.”