Court Opinion

ID: 9453507
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-04 18:15:37.134622+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:33:41.294731
License: Public Domain

TUTTLE, Circuit Judge
(dissenting):
With deference to the views of my colleagues, I dissent. It does seem as though this issue is something of a tempest in a teapot. However, we are faced with the problem of three teenage school children in Dallas, Texas, being denied a high school education because the length of their hair did not suit the school authorities. Upon the assumption made by the court in its opinion that “for the purpose of this opinion a hairstyle is a constitutionally protected mode of expression,” I would say that there is no countervailing state need or requirement that would warrant such interference with the constitutional first amendment right under the standard adopted by the Court in the quotation from Dennis v. United States, 341 U.S. 494, 71 S.Ct. 857, 95 L.Ed. 1137: “In each case [courts] must ask whether the gravity of the ‘evil,’ discounted by its improbability, justifies such invasion of free speech as is necessary to avoid the danger.”
Moreover, even though the method of wearing the hair is not constitutionally protected under the First Amendment, it appears to me, without the slightest doubt that this is an utterly unreasonable classification of students by the state in granting or denying the right of a public education. This of course, if true, is violative of the Fourteenth Amendment.
So far as the majority opinion finds support in Blackwell v. Issaquena County Board of Education, 363 F.2d 749, I take this first opportunity, with deference, to note my disagreement with the holding there.1 I think both in that case and upon the record before us here, we find courts too prone to permit a curtailment of a constitutional right of a dissenter, because of the likelihood that it will bring disorder, resistance or improper and even violent action by those supporting the status quo. It seems to me it cannot be said too often that the constitutional rights of an individual cannot be denied him because his exercise of them produces violent reaction by those who would deprive him of the very rights he seeks to assert. In Terminiello v. City of Chicago, 337 U.S. 1, 69 S.Ct. 894, 93 L.Ed. 1131, the United States Supreme Court said:
“Accordingly a function of free speech under our system of government is to invite dispute. It may indeed best serve its high purpose when it induces a condition of unrest, creates dissatisfaction with conditions as they are, or even stirs people to anger. Speech is often provocative and challenging. It may strike at prejudices and preconceptions and have profound unsettling effects as it presses for acceptance of an idea. That is why freedom of speech, though not absolute, Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire, supra, 315 U.S. [568] at pages 571-572, 62 S.Ct. [766] at page 769, 86 L.Ed. 1031, is nevertheless protected against censorship or punishment, unless shown likely to produce a clear and present danger of a serious substantive evil that rises far above public inconvenience, annoyance, or unrest. * * * There is no room under our Constitution for a more restrictive view. * * * The ordinance as construed by the trial court seriously invaded this province. It permitted conviction of petitioner if his speech stirred people to anger, invited public *706dispute, or brought about a condition of unrest. A conviction resting on any of those grounds may not stand.”
These boys were not barred from school because of any actions carried out by them which were of themselves a disturbance of the peace. They were barred because it was anticipated, by reason of previous experiences, that their fellow students in some instances would do things that would disrupt the serenity or calm of the school. It is these acts that should be prohibited, not the expressions of individuality by the suspended students.

. In Issaquena the trial court denied an injunction to prohibit the continued suspension of some 300 Mississippi students for wearing “freedom” buttons. It will be noted that the opinion of this court affirming the judgment cited at length, in three footnotes, disorderly conduct by some of the button-wearing students, after the principal had issued his order to the original small number of wearers to stop wearing the buttons. No effort was made to discipline the small number of button-wearers who created noise and disturbance. Instead the principal struck at the idea of wearing the buttons itself.