Former teen protester gives lesson in courage at CCSN

Saturday, Oct. 29, 2005 | 9:26 a.m.

When Mary Beth Tinker protested the Vietnam War in 1965 Des Moines, Iowa, the then-13-year-old was suspended from school, received death threats and ultimately took her freedom of expression case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Tinker won her case, which set the precedent for future freedom of expression cases for both students and teachers. Now, 40 years later, she finds herself a strange sort of celebrity.

Speaking about her landmark First Amendment case Thursday night at the Community College of Southern Nevada, Tinker, now 53, was treated with a reverence usually reserved for rock stars.

"Don't just do what is popular, because that (what's popular) is going to change later on. Do what's right," Tinker told about 70 people in the West Charleston campus' auditorium.

Many of the students in the room recently studied the Tinker v. Des Moines School District case as part of Nevada school law class.

The case centered around whether the wearing of black arm bands to school to mourn the dead in Vietnam was a protected mode of expression. The Des Moines school district prohibited the arm bands and suspended Tinker and her older brother John for wearing them, arguing that the bands disrupted the learning process.

The Supreme Court disagreed, with Justice Abe Fortas arguing that the students had expressed their opinion in a silent, passive way that was protected. He famously wrote that students and teachers do not "shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate."

"This is an icon of school law history," CCSN professor Linda Miller, who teaches Nevada school law and brought Tinker in, said. "She was only 13 years old when she stood up for what she believed in. I think she can give them (students) an inside view of what a Supreme Court case is like that they can't get out of their textbook because she lived it."

"Learning about the Mary Beth Tinker case and being able to come and hear her tell her story in her own words, it's real history you know?" Candace Torian, a 21-year-old secondary education student, said.

Torian, like many of her fellow students, also believed that Tinker's courage, well, rocked.

"I think it was a small gesture that had huge repercussions," Torian said.

Tinker, who works as a family nurse practitioner in Los Angeles, said she had no intention of being a test case for freedom of expression when she and her friends in a church youth group decided to wear the bands to school. After all, she was in junior high and her chief concerns were slumber parties and going roller skating on Friday nights.

But she was also the child of a Methodist minister, taught by both her parents to promote peace and to stand up against what she believed was wrong. The images from Vietnam made her sad, Tinker said, both for the 1,000 American soldiers killed by that time and the thousands more Vietnamese civilians.

Her father didn't want her and her brother to wear the bands because the school district had gotten wind of the protest and pre-emptively banned the arm bands. He believed in following rules, Tinker said -- but he also supported their right to protest.

Her case also might not have been a case at all if her school hadn't suspended her, Tinker said. When a school administrator told her to take it off, she did. But the administrator sent her home anyway.

The American Civil Liberties Union fought the case on behalf of her family and another student, Christopher Eckhardt, because the organization thought it was a good test case, Tinker said.

After the decision, Tinker said she avoided notoriety, working for nearly 20 years as a piano tuner before going back to school to become a nurse. She said she had been afraid of being fired for her beliefs, as she saw her father pushed out of the church for standing up for civil rights and her mother lose her job as a university professor for doing the same.

In the end, she decided that life is better when you are a little unpopular. She shares her story with high school and college students nationwide, often, like at CCSN, just for the cost of her air fare to get there.

She's also involved in everything from promoting Constitution Days to alternatives to military recruitment in high schools to actively promoting nurse's rights and health care issues through her union.

"When you take a stand, when you speak up, your life is much more meaningful," Tinker told the CCSN audience.

Christina Littlefield can be reached at 259-8813 or at clittle@ lasvegassun.com.