Living History

Forty years after they stood up for their right to wear anti-war armbands, Mary Beth and John Tinker advise students that free speech is still worth fighting for.

Des Moines, Iowa

John and Mary Beth Tinker are back in a classroom in their hometown, once again wearing black armbands and drawing attention to a war.

Now in their 50s, the siblings are living symbols of constitutional rights for secondary school students. In 1965, they and a handful of others were suspended for wearing black armbands to their public schools here to protest the Vietnam War. The Tinkers and another student, Christopher Eckhardt, took their case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, where in 1969 they won the landmark ruling in Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District that wearing such an armband in school was symbolic speech protected by the First Amendment as long as school was not substantially disrupted.

“All of us are concerned about the war in Iraq,” Mary Beth tells a group of about 90 middle and high school students at Central Academy, a public magnet school where students take Advanced Placement courses...