The United States Supreme Court has often played a major role in expanding constitutional liberties in the United States. There was Plessy vs. Ferguson, where Homer Adolph Plessy, who was seven-eighths Caucasian, took a seat in a "whites only" car of a Louisiana train and once he refused to move to the car for blacks, he was arrested. There was also New Jersey vs. T.L.O., who was a 14 year old girl, accused of smoking in the girls' bathroom in school. The principal at the school searched her purse, discovering a bag of marijuana and other drug paraphernalia. The Supreme Court was to decide if the principle violate the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments. During the decade of the 1960's, the Supreme Court had made many decisions that expanded individual rights. Two of some of the most popular cases, Tinker v. Des Moines School District and Mapp v. Ohio, dealt with the 1st , 4th , & 14th Amendments.
In 1969, John Tinker, who was 15 years old, his sister Mary Beth Tinker, 13 years old, and Christopher Echardt, 16 years old, decided along with their parents to protest against U.S. government policies in the Vietnam War by wearing black armbands to their schools in Des Moines during the christmas holiday season. When they learned about their intentions, and feared that the armbands would cause disturbances, the principals of Des Moines' school districts decided that all students wearing the armbands, be asked to remove them or face suspension. When the Tinkers and Christopher wore their armbands to school, they were asked to remove them. After they refused, they were suspended until after New Year's Day. The Tinker family brought the school to court to question whether the students' suspension for wearing the armbands, violated the student's constitutional rights to free speech. .
The Supreme Court saw them wearing the armbands as implied speech, which is protected by the First Amendment. The Supreme Court took the Tinkers' side, stating that "students do not shed their rights at the schoolhouse door.
