I speak. I gather. I petition. I believe. I write. Mary Beth Tinker, a First Amendment advocate believed in speaking for what she stood for, which started her campaign, the Tinker Tour USA.

She said that her father was a Methodist preacher, so he started getting his family into the civil rights movement because he didn’t believe in segregation.

“When you see something that is not fair or right, not Christianly or not democratic, the way I was raised was to put it in action here on earth,” she said.

With segregation around her, she and her brothers wanted to stand up and exercise their freedom of speech. They wore black wristbands with a peace symbol to protest against the Vietnam war. The protest reached the Supreme Court but the court ruled they had a right to speak out against the war.

Growing up during the Vietnam war, led to forming her campaign, Tinker Tour USA. The campaign urges students to fight for their freedom of speech.

The tour started in Philadelphia and headed North through states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Birmingham and recently to the Supreme Court in Washington D.C. The next destination that her and her partner, Student Press Law Center attorney Mike Hiestand, will travel to is Kansas City.

They raised $50,000 in a crowd sourcing campaign to get the Tinker Tour started. The money they raised helped them purchase an RV and gas money.

“Without the crowd sourcing campaign we could not have gotten the campaign rolling,” she said.

She said she is honored to be here with the JEA /NSPA journalism convention and that she comes for the journalists.

“Boston is really important because it was the birth place of journalism and free speech,” she said. “We wanted to come because of all the students. They are wonderful and doing such good things with the journalism programs and keeping journalism, not only alive but helping it grow.”