393 U.S. 503
Facts:
In 1965, students in Des Moines students met outside of school to wear armbands to show support for a truce in Vietnam. The students decided to wear black armbands throughout the Christmas holiday season until the New Year. The school’s administration found out about the plan prior to its implementation and made a rule that if any student were to wear an armband in school, they would be asked to remove it and if they did not, they would be suspended. Administrators at the school did warn the students that they would be suspended if they wore armbands.
Mary Beth Tinker and Christopher Eckhardt wore their armbands two days after the rule was put into place. They were asked to take the armbands off, …show more content…
Supreme Court. It started out in the District Court where the case was dismissed and then moved to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit where the decision was upheld and no opinion was given by the …show more content…
Vietnam was a very long and controversial war, and up until the U.S. war in Afghanistan, was the longest war in U.S. history and was a controversial subject in the 60’s. Justice Fortas argues that if such subjects cannot be discussed, debated and talked about in school, then the school is failing to properly prepare these students for the future and our future leaders would be worse off for it. He argues that school is the very place for these kinds of topics to be brought up.
He uses Hammond v. South Carolina State College, 272 and Dickey v. Alabama State Board of Education to support that there is case law overturning school institutions from policies that restrict students’ free speech, under the term pure speech. As it applies to this case, no one who would observe these black armbands would deem the subject matter to be disruptive or offensive.
One of the justifications to ban the armbands was to protect against a future harmful act from happening to begin with. The school feared that it might be a disruption or cause harm so they put the ban in place to protect against anything that might happen. Justice Fortas uses Terminiello v. Chicago, 337 U.S. 1 to justify this opinion that the fear of something bad might happen due to pure speech cannot be the basis of a policy that prohibits the use of pure