Lillian Gobitas Klose, 90, Dies; Stood Against Mandatory Pledge - NYTimes.com

“If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion or other matters of opinion, or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.”

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Lillian Gobitas’s family belonged to the Jehovah’s Witnesses and heeded a leader’s call to refuse to recite the pledge in compliance with biblical commands against idolatry. On Oct. 22, 1935, Lillian’s brother William Gobitas, a fifth grader, refused to say the pledge at his public school in Minersville, Pa. The next day, Lillian did the same thing. The town school board responded by passing a resolution calling refusal to recite the pledge an act of insubordination. It then expelled the Gobitas children.

“They expelled us right then and there,” Mrs. Klose said in an interview with The Philadelphia Inquirer in 2003. “They said, ‘Don’t come back.’ ”

For 12-year-old Lillian, the sting from her act of conscience — which she said was entirely the result of her own thinking, not her parents’ — was sharp. Children threw rocks at her, The Washington Post reported in 1988.

She overheard two girls talking. “We used to be friends with her,” one said. People jeered the family on the streets. William was beaten by schoolmates. Local churches led a boycott of the family’s grocery store.

“It got real ugly,” Mrs. Klose told The Morning Call, a daily newspaper published in Allentown, Pa., in 1988. “They thought we were Communists, Nazis. They felt real righteous about it.”

The controversy led to an eight-year legal battle. It pitted the virtues of a strong national government — unified by patriotic sentiment as the country was edging toward war — against the protection of individuals from being coerced by that government. The Supreme Court decided 8 to 1 in 1940 that compelling students to say the pledge was not a violation of religious freedom, with Justice Felix Frankfurter writing the majority opinion.

The ruling sparked attacks on 1,488 Witnesses in 44 states, the American Civil Liberties Union reported.

In West Virginia, Witnesses were forced to swallow large amounts of castor oil. In Wyoming, they were tarred and feathered; in Nebraska, they were castrated. In Maine, a mob of 2,500 burned down a local Witness place of worship, known as a Kingdom Hall.

On the other side, Eleanor Roosevelt and editorials in 170 newspapers strongly defended the Witnesses’ rights. The New Republic suggested that compelling the pledge created the risk of “adopting Hitler’s philosophy” of ultranationalism. The case would end in 1943 with the Supreme Court, with different membership, reversing the 1940 ruling by a 6-to-3 vote in a near-identical case — a startlingly rapid judicial about-face.

Lillian Gobitas Klose, 90, Dies; Stood Against Mandatory Pledge - NYTimes.com


See also:

Letter, Billy Gobitas to Minersville, Pennsylvania, school directors, explaining why the young Jehovah's Witness refused to salute the American flag,

SCOTUS ruling that public schools could compel students—in this case, Jehovah's Witnesses—to salute the American Flag and recite the Pledge of Allegiance despite the students' religious objections to these practices.
 
The 1943 SCOTUS decision that overruled Minersville v Gobitas, stating that the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution protected students from being forced to salute the American flag and say the Pledge of Allegiance in school.

Knocking (2006) documentary that focuses on the civil liberties fought for by Jehovah's Witnesses:  Conscientious objection, and rejection of blood transfusions and saluting the flag (featuring Lillian Gobitas.)