On May 2, 1963, thousands of students walked out of their schools in Birmingham, Alabama, to protest the racially segregated society in which they were meant to live. By the end of the day, over 1,000 of them were in jail. More of them walked out the next day. Some of them were blown down the concrete sidewalk with fire hoses, blown like trash into the gutters of the city. One of them was a nine-year-old named Audrey Faye Hendricks. In , there is a conversation that Audrey Faye Hendricks had with her mother:

But, before she could be free, there was something important she had to do. "I want to go to jail," Audrey had told her mother. Since Mr. and Mrs. Hendricks thought that was a good idea, they helped her get ready.

On December 16 and 17, 1965, a student at Warren Harding Junior High in Des Moines named Mary Beth Tinker wore a black armband to class in order to protest the Vietnam War. She was suspended by the local school board. She fought her case all the way up to the United States Supreme Court which, on February 4, 1969, ruled in her favor, 7-2. Writing for the majority, Justice Abe Fortas declared:

In our system, state-operated schools may not be enclaves of totalitarianism. School officials do not possess absolute authority over their students. Students in school, as well as out of school, are "persons" under our Constitution. They are possessed of fundamental rights which the State must respect, just as they themselves must respect their obligations to the State. In our system, students may not be regarded as closed-circuit recipients of only that which the State chooses to communicate. They may not be confined to the expression of those sentiments that are officially approved. In the absence of a specific showing of constitutionally valid reasons to regulate their speech, students are entitled to freedom of expression of their view…[Students do not] shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.

Contacted by The74million.com prior to Tuesday’s national walkout in support of sensible gun control and against any more schoolhouse massacres, Mary Beth Tinker explained the connective tissue between all three of this signifying events.

Five decades after Tinker wore a black armband to school in Des Moines, Iowa, to protest the Vietnam War, the retired nurse now travels to schools across the country and encourages students to speak up. “I was telling some kids, ‘When the kids marched in Birmingham in 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. called it a turning point in the civil rights movement, and I think this is another turning point now,” she said...“But the fact is, most adults didn’t know very much, at all, about Vietnam either,” she said. “When young people are criticized just for the fact of their age, that just shows that people have a pretty weak critique of what’s going on.”

Truth be told, the ensuing decades have seen a radical trimming back of Fortas’s conception of what rights are and are not shed at the schoolhouse door. Mandatory drug-testing under the Supreme Court’s 1995 Vernonia decision pretty much shed the Fourth and Fifth Amendments on behalf of students. And subsequent decisions have whittled away Tinker through the loophole in the original decision by which school authorities could suppress expression if it involves a “substantial disruption” to the learning process. (Hello, there, Bong Hits 4 Jesus.) And truancy laws still apply, and can be used harshly or benignly, depending on local school officials.

Getty Images

So, when tens of thousands of schoolchildren walked out of class all over America on Wednesday, they weren’t merely acting in a brave and proud tradition. (Emma Gonzalez, the firebrand from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, even cited Tinker in her remarkable address in the wake of the massacre in Parkland, Florida.) Depending on how rigid their principals and school boards are, they also were taking a considerable chance.

That they walked anyway should be a warning to petty dictators all over a country that has too damn many of them running school boards, city councils, high schools, manufacturing plants, and corporate offices. And there’s one running the executive branch of the United States government, now that I think of it.

They walked out of Columbine High School in Colorado, where 15 were gunned down in 1999 in an event that horrified the nation and that should have been enough. From The Denver Post:

“Even though Columbine happened 19 years ago, nothing has changed to prevent this from happening again,” a Columbine student speaking into a microphone told classmates. Other students tied orange ribbons — a symbol of gun violence protest — to a fence. “We are Columbine. Once a Rebel, always a Rebel. We are a community. And enough is enough,” said 15-year-old Columbine student Leah Zundle.

They walked out of Newtown High School in Newtown, Connecticut, where 27 were gunned down in an elementary school in 2012 in an event that horrified the nation and that should have been enough. From The Hartford Courant:

In Connecticut, students have said they have felt compelled to speak up and spark change as members of Generation Z, the age group following the millennials that has only known a world after large-scale tragedies such as the massacre at Columbine High School, 9/11 and the one closest to home — the 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown. Some of those who felt the tragedy directly stood with others together outside Newtown High School. One student, standing a head above the rest, held a bold sign that read: “END THE MURDER.”

Compared to ending an unjust war in Southeast Asia, or demanding the rights that should have accrued to you as an American at birth, what these kids are demanding doesn’t seem to be that big a deal. They would prefer not to take live fire in their classrooms and watch their friends, and prom dates, and football heroes, and beloved teachers shot down in front of them. That really doesn’t seem like that heavy a lift for an evolved democracy. And, in case they need any more encouragement, here’s a little Mavis to make their feet a little lighter.

This content is imported from YouTube. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io