In December 1965,
Des Moines, Iowa residents John F. Tinker (15 years old), John's younger sister Mary Beth Tinker, (13 years old) and their friend Christopher Eckhardt (16 years old) decided to wear black armbands showing peace symbols on them to their schools (
high school for John and Christopher,
junior high for Mary Beth) in protest of the
Vietnam War and supporting the Christmas Truce called for by Senator
Robert F. Kennedy. The school board apparently heard rumor of this and chose to pass a policy banning the wearing of armbands to school. Violating students would be suspended and allowed to return to school after agreeing to comply with the policy. Mary Beth Tinker and Christopher Eckhardt chose to violate this policy, and the next day John Tinker also did so. All were suspended from school until after January 1, 1966, when their protest had been scheduled to end.
A suit was not filed until after the
Iowa Civil Liberties Union approached their family, and the ICLU agreed to help the family with the lawsuit. Their parents, in turn, filed suit in U.S. District Court, which upheld the decision of the Des Moines school board. A tie vote in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit meant that the U.S. District Court's decision continued to stand, and forced the Tinkers and Eckhardts to appeal to the Supreme Court directly. The case was argued before the court on November 12, 1968.
[edit] Opinion of the Court
The court's 7 to 2 decision held that the First Amendment applied to public schools, and that administrators would have to demonstrate constitutionally valid reasons for any specific regulation of speech in the classroom. Justice
Abe Fortas wrote the majority opinion, holding that the speech regulation at issue in Tinker was "based upon an urgent wish to avoid the controversy which might result from the expression, even by the silent symbol of armbands, of opposition to this Nation's part in the conflagration in Vietnam." The Court held that in order for school officials to justify censoring speech, they "must be able to show that [their] action was caused by something more than a mere desire to avoid the discomfort and unpleasantness that always accompany an unpopular viewpoint," allowing schools to forbid conduct that would "materially and substantially interfere with the requirements of appropriate discipline in the operation of the school."
[1] The Court found that the actions of the Tinkers in wearing armbands did not cause disruption and held that their activity represented constitutionally protected symbolic speech.
