Landmark Supreme Court ruling on First Amendment rights for students is focus of College of Saint Mary presentation
College of Saint Mary on Tuesday, March 21 will host two free presentations on the landmark ruling in which the Supreme Court affirmed students’ right of free speech. Both the 12 p.m. and 7 p.m. events will be held in Gross Auditorium.
The case, Tinker v. Independent Community School District No. 21, 393 U.S. 502 (1969), is commonly known as the Tinker Ruling. It is still cited in nearly every student First Amendment case, and almost all American civics and history textbooks still refer to it.
Mary Beth Tinker, who was at the heart of the landmark case, was included in the book 101 Changemakers: Rebels and Radicals Who Changed U.S. History, along with Mark Twain, Rosa Parks, Albert Einstein and Muhammad Ali. Tinker will speak about not only the ruling, but about the state of free speech and civic awareness among America’s young people.
Although nearly 45 years old, the Tinker Ruling is deeply relevant today as policymakers impose limits on students’ use of digital technology. Three federal courts of appeal have decided in the last few years that Tinker is just as applicable to students’ off-campus speech using social networking pages as on-campus speech.
Mary Beth Tinker was a shy 13-year-old from Des Moines, Iowa when she and a group of fellow junior high school students were punished for wearing black arm bands in honor of the servicemen who had died in Vietnam and to support Robert F. Kennedy’s call for a Christmas truce. She and the other students, with the help of their parents, then sued the school district for violating their rights of expression.
For the next four years, the students and their parents endured countless heated school board meetings, two lower federal court cases and death threats. Finally, in 1969, Supreme Court ruled 7-2 that students “do not shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.”
Chris Kasel, Media Relations Coordinator
