Tinker+v.+Des+Moines

Mary Beth Tinker Interview: []

In the year 1965 a group of students met at the house of Christopher Eckhardt in Des Moines, Iowa. They had planned to protest the Vietnam War by wearing black arm bands to school on Dec 16. On Dec 14 the principal heard about the students where going to plan on wearing the armbands to protest the war. The principal said they would be suspended if they wore them to school. Almost all of the group that had already planned to protest backed out because they didn't want it on their records for colleges. On the day of the protest Christopher Eckhardt who was 16 and a student at Theodore Roosevelt High and Mary-Beth Tinker who was 13 and a student at Warren Harding Junior High wore their homemade black arm bands. The arm bands had a peace sign on them. the next day Mary older brother John wore his to North high school along with two dozen others. however all 5 students were singled out for not following the rule and wearing the armbands.
 * Christopher Eckhardt
 * John Tinker
 * Mary-Beth Tinker
 * Christine Singer
 * Bruce Clark

The case made its way to the Supreme Court on November 19th, 1968. Overturning the previous court decisions that favored the school’s stance, the majority of the supreme court (7 to 2) ruled on Feburary 24th, 1969, that the armbands were protected by the first amendment. They dismissed the school’s argument on the grounds that a paranoia for potential arguments provoked by the armbands is not enough to discipline the students and they would need a genuine and concrete reason for taking any action against them. With the two dissents, Hugo Black and John M. Harlan II, Black argued that, while he was in favor of the first and fourteenth amendments, he stated that "I repeat that if the time has come when pupils of state-supported schools, kindergartens, grammar schools, or high schools, can defy and flout orders of school officials to keep their minds on their own schoolwork, it is the beginning of a new revolutionary era of permissiveness in this country fostered by the judiciary." Harlan argued that he had "[found] nothing in this record which impugns the good faith of respondents in promulgating the armband regulation."

Sources


 * [|^] ** //Tinker//, 393 U.S. at 526.

// Tinker //, 393 U.S. at 517-18.