Students First Amendment rights in school: Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District

In December 1965 in Des Moines, Iowa three teenagers, John F. Tinker his younger sister Mary Beth Tinker and their friend Christopher Eckhardt decided to wear black armbands to their schools in protest of the Vietname War. The principals of the Des Moines schools banned the wearing of armbands to school. Violating students would be suspended and allowed to return to school after agreeing to comply with the policy. These three students chose to violate this policy. All three were suspended from school. A suit was not filed until after the Iowa Civil Liberties Union approached their family, and the ACLU 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.

The court decided 7 to 2 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. The court famously stated, "It can hardly be argued that either students or teachers shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate." 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. 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.