Her name is Mary Beth Tinker. Today she's a nurse in D.C., but in 1965 she was an eighth-grade student in Iowa (pictured above):
But by Christmas that year, about a thousand American soldiers had been killed in Vietnam and President Johnson had to decide whether to escalate the war or try to negotiate peace. A lot of people thought it was patriotic to support the war, but others thought we should try peace. One of them, Senator Robert Kennedy, proposed a Christmas truce. Some students in Des Moines decided to wear black armbands to support him, and wrote an article about it in their school newspaper. The principals saw the article and ruled that any students who tried to wear black armbands to school would be suspended.
After that, we weren’t sure what to do. We’d learned about the Bill of Rights and the First Amendment in school, and we felt free speech should apply to kids, too. We also had the examples of brave people standing up against dogs and firehoses to fight racism. In the end, we decided to go ahead and wear the armbands, and some of us were suspended.
But that wasn't the end of the story. The students took their case to the U.S. Supreme Court and they won -- 40 years ago today, Feb. 24, 1969. It's a powerful lesson in what it means to be an American, and in never giving up. It's a lesson that a lot of us need to hear today. Especially the second one.
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Add "literally" and "sexy" to that list.— Ramon- Comment removed.
Also on this date in 1980 the U.S. Hockey Team defeated Finland 4-2 to complete the Miracle on Ice. A group of young men who truly lifted the spirits of the American people despite the best efforts of Jimmy Carter to stop them.— bird11- There are literally thousands of American heros I have never met who gave their lives for the hero of this blog post to do what she did. Many of them reside in Arlington National Cemetary or Normandy beach in France or several other places.....— Ramon
- I thought Carter's boycott of the 1980 Olympics was stupid, then (and I didn't vote for him, remember) and now, but in the interest of accuracy I don't believe he did anything related to the Winter Olympics. I could be wrong, but I don't think the host country can ban participants.— will
Would a college student at Berkeley who openly supports the Iraq war qualify as a hero in your book, Will?— jmc- carter announced the U.S. boycott of the summer games in advance of the 1980 winter olympics - wanted USSR pullout by 2/20/80. Most experts believed this would lead to a boycott by the Soviet bloc countries fortunately as so often happens the experts were wrong and the soviets didn't retaliate until the 1984 Summer games by boycotting the L.A. games.— bird11
- obviously carter was calling for a pullout from Afghanistan by 2/20/80 not for the Soviets to pull out of Olympics— bird11
- Will if you didn't vote for Carter, does that mean you voted for Reagan in '80? and if so why are you authoring books trying to rip down his legacy— taxmemore
- taxmemore - I am betting Will was a JohnAnderson man in 1980— bird11
- yeah, lets talk about any old thing, as long as it draws attention away from the current economic disaster, worst since the depression.— CharlieDontSurf
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Will Bunch, a senior writer at the Philadelphia Daily News, blogs about his obsessions, including national and local politics and world affairs, the media, pop music, the Philadelphia Phillies, soccer and other sports, not necessarily in that order.
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