The Schoolhouse Gates

Make No Law: The First Amendment Podcast

Legal Talk Network

Politics, History, Government, News

4.9 • 644 Ratings

🗓️ 31 January 2018

⏱️ 33 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In late 1965, a 13-year-old student named Mary Beth Tinker was suspended for wearing a black armband to school to support a truce in the Vietnam war. Through her parents, Mary sued the school. Ken White, alongside Mary Beth Tinker herself, dives into the Tinker v. Des Moines case and how it has impacted freedom of speech for students on campuses today. While Mary Beth Tinker’s rights were upheld, many plaintiffs in First Amendment cases since have faced less sympathetic courts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:22.8	entrepreneurs like you. Sign up for your $1 a month trial at Shopify.com slash setup. In 1965, a 13-year-old girl named Mary Beth Tinker started getting the sort of abuse that 8th graders usually don't face.
1:06.0	We started getting hate mail and people sending threatening mail and messages.
1:10.0	A lady called on the phone and ask if it was Mary Beth, and I said, yes.
1:11.6	And she said, I'm going to kill you.
1:18.8	Someone threatened to bomb our house on Christmas Eve. They threw red paint at our house. They'd always call us communists.
1:26.1	And send us, you know, postcards with hammer and sickle on it and say, why don't you go back to Russia, China?
1:29.6	My mom would say, we're not communist, we're Methodist.
1:39.6	Who is Mary Beth Tinker?
1:42.4	And why would people be saying these terrible things to her?
1:48.0	And why are we still talking about it more than 50 years later? Mary Beth Tinker was a kid who stood up and spoke her mind.
1:53.0	Or maybe more accurately, she wore her heart on her sleeve.
1:56.0	Mary Beth Tinker wore a black armband to protest the war in Vietnam to Warren Harding Junior High School in Des Moines, Iowa.
2:05.1	She was suspended, her family sued, and the case took her all the way to the United States Supreme Court,
2:11.4	where she helped establish crucial precedent about the free speech rights of students, something she fights for to this day.
2:18.2	We thought it was pretty ordinary, actually, even to wear the armbands. I mean, we didn't,
2:22.8	we had no idea that it was going to turn into, you know, a big, big deal.
2:29.3	But it was a big deal. And ordinary people can make history too. I'm Ken White, and this is
2:38.3	Make No Law, the First Amendment podcast from Pohpat.com brought to you on the Legal Talk
	...

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