With megaphones in one hand and smartphones in another, Iowa City’s student activists crowd the streets while scrolling through the very news that brought them there — consuming breaking news as they become part of it.
Although the immediacy and digitalization of protesting feels distinctly modern, the spirit of student activism has long been embedded in Iowa City’s cultural identity. During the Vietnam War, students organized mass demonstrations on the Iowa City Pentacrest, joining a nationwide wave of campus resistance to the United States military involvement abroad. In the decades that followed, students continued to mobilize around major political moments, ranging from the Iraq War in the early 2000s to police violence and racial injustice under the “Black Lives Matter” movement.
One of Iowa’s defining student-led efforts was Tinker v. Des Moines, a landmark First Amendment Supreme Court case. Spearheaded by Mary Beth Tinker in 1965, a group of students planned to wear black armbands at school as a silent protest against the Vietnam War. Tinker recalls the events that had built up to the protest…