After four years of legal battle, in February of 1969, the Supreme Court took a landmark decision regarding that the students, in the case, Mary Beth and John Tinker and their friend, Christopher Eckhardt, from Des Moines, Iowa, "do not shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate." The Supreme Court in the decision was very specific: "the First Amendment applied to public schools, and school officials could not censor student speech unless it disrupted the educational process."