116 3rd St SE
Cedar Rapids, Iowa 52401
Mary Beth Tinker, an Iowa free speech icon
In 1965, when Mary Beth Tinker was an eighth-grader at Harding Junior High in Des Moines, she and five other students, including her brother, John, 15, wore black bands on their arms to protest the Vietnam War. The students were suspended from school.
'We had examples in our life of people who really sacrifice and the Birmingham kids, four of them, were killed for speaking up against racial segregation,” Tinker said in a 2019 interview with Iowa PBS. 'I felt like getting suspended was really not a very bad thing to happen, compared to that.”
Still, some people didn't like what the Tinkers and the other students did. The Tinkers had red paint thrown at their house and also received threatening phone calls and mail.
In 1966, the Iowa Civil Liberties Union filed a federal lawsuit that said the Des Moines school district had broken the students' right to free speech. That case went all the way to the United States Supreme Court, which decided in 1969 students in public schools do have the First Amendment right to free speech. That case was a landmark that has helped students across the country have the right to speak and write about controversial topics.
Tinker went on to become a pediatric - or children's - nurse and now lives in Washington, D.C. She's still speaking out for the rights of children, particularly in the areas of health, education and journalism.
Comments: erin.jordan@thegazette.com
Mary Beth Tinker and her brother, John F. Tinker, display their armbands in a photo during a slideshow shown to a group of students at Prairie High School in Cedar Rapids on Wednesday, May 4, 2016. The Tinkers were at the center of a landmark freedom of speech case decided by the Supreme Court in 1969, Tinker vs. Des Moines Independent Community School District, which held that students should be allowed to wear black armbands protesting the Vietnam War while in school as an expression of symbolic speech, which is protected by the First Amendment. The 'Tinker Test' still is used by courts to determine whether an action violates a student's First Amendment rights. (Rebecca F. Miller/The Gazette)
Mary Beth Tinker speaks to Alyssa Grady, 18, a junior at Prairie High School in Cedar Rapids on Wednesday, May 4, 2016. Tinker was at the center of a landmark freedom of speech case decided by the Supreme Court in 1969, Tinker vs. Des Moines Independent Community School District, which held that Tinker and other students should be allowed to wear black armbands protesting the Vietnam War while in school as an expression of symbolic speech, which is protected by the First Amendment. The 'Tinker Test' still is used by courts to determine whether an action violates a student's First Amendment rights. (Rebecca F. Miller/The Gazette)
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