Free Speech and the Wilcox Collection:
Forty Years of Collecting Political Documents

Many of the items on this site have been taken from a scrapbook kept during the 1963-64 school year by a KU student, Laird Wilcox, while he was chairman of the Student Union Association Minority Opinions Forum. The Forum was very active during that year bringing speakers to campus to talk to students about apartheid in South Africa, communism, the American Nazi Party and the Socialist Labor Party, as well as other topics.

One year later, in 1965, the University Libraries purchased a collection of books, serials, pamphlets and ephemera from that same student launching the establishment of the Wilcox Collection of Contemporary Political Movements, which has grown to become one of the largest collections of American Left and Right Wing political materials in the country.