Mary Beth Tinker and free speech

Mary Beth was the plaintiff in Tinker v. Des Moines in 1969, the Supreme Court case that granted her (as a 13 year old) the right to wear a black arm band at school to protest the Vietnam war.  She doesn't have much patience with the modern day suppressors of free speech:

College students rejecting freedom of speech

My students and I recently met with Mary Beth Tinker, who was 13 years old when she was suspended by her school in Des Moines, Iowa, for an extreme act: wearing a black armband protesting the Vietnam War. Her case wove its way up to the Supreme Court, which upheld her free-speech rights in the landmark Tinker v. Des Moines decision in 1969.

All of my students said they should be allowed to engage in antiwar demonstrations, of course, but they drew the line at racist or sexist speech that causes - yes - psychological injury. But Tinker wasn't having it. Surely, she said, parents whose children were fighting in Vietnam - or, especially, students whose parents had died there - were profoundly wounded by her very public act of protest. Yet that wasn't a good enough reason to silence her, or anybody.

Other students argued that free speech is really a matter of power, which has become another popular line on our campuses. In a society marred by racial inequality, the argument goes, speech is used by whites to oppress minorities. Hence white speech must be restrained, so that minorities can be protected.

But Tinker wasn't buying that, either. Historically, free speech has been a weapon - often, the only weapon - of the powerless, not the powerful. At the time her case began, Tinker reminded us, she was a child. And speech was all she had.

That's why every great champion of African American freedom in our history - including Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Martin Luther King Jr. - has also been a warrior for freedom of expression. "To suppress free speech is a double wrong," Douglass told a Boston audience in 1860, after a mob had broken up an anti-slavery meeting at the same location. "It is just as criminal to rob a man of his right to speak and hear as it would be to rob him of his money."

http://www.philly.com/philly/opinion/commentary/20170419_College_student...

Worth your time to read the whole thing.