Civil rights activist Mary Beth Tinker addresses over 700 student journalists at the Sponsors of School Publications Spring Conference on March 11, at Webster University.
Aerin Johnson
Johnson.Aerin@wgecho.org
Mary Beth Tinker, one of the young people who expressed their First Amendment rights during the Vietnam War, spoke at the Sponsors of School Publications (SSP) conference on March 11.
Tinker was part the case of Tinker vs. Des Moines, when she wore a black arm band to school for a Christmas Truce that Robert Kennedy had proposed at the time. She had worn a black arm band, which was often used to show mourning, to school and had been told to talk it off. She did take it off but was suspended anyway.
“(It’s a) Way to live, a way of life to speak up,” Tinker said to students at SSP about the First Amendment.
Tinker began by asking at the conference if students knew their First Amendment rights. As the rights were listed, she gave the percentage of people surveyed who knew about that part of the First Amendment. She said that 60 percent of people knew about the right of speech, 9 percent knew about assembly, 16 percent knew about religion, 40 percent knew about press, and only 2 percent knew about the right to petition.
Her father was a Methodist preacher who lost his church because he helped with a petition that would allow black children into an all-white pool. They ended up moving to Iowa, for using their First Amendment rights.
Tinker started to use her First Amendment rights during the Vietnam War to ask for peace. About 1,000 soldiers had been killed by the time Robert Kennedy had asked for the Christmas treaty.
“Imagination is more important than knowledge,” Tinker said quoting Albert Einstein about the young people who change the world.
While the lower levels of the court system did not rule in favor of Tinker, the Supreme Court had ruled in favor of the her and her family’s freedom of speech. It said First Amendment rights to not stop at the school gates.
