Here Is Where: Discovering America's Great Forgotten History (21 page)

Almost overnight, Jehovah’s Witnesses came under attack, vilified by their assailants as un-American. “In June a mob of Legionnaires dragged some of Jehovah’s Witnesses from their automobiles as they were sitting in the Court House Square at Jasper and beat them up,” John Adams of Beaumont, Texas, recalled in a sworn affidavit. “When some bystanders attempted to come to the rescue of these people,” he went on, “they likewise were beaten—two of them being a frail woman and her daughter. When the woman and her daughter appealed to the Sheriff and Deputy and Town Marshall of Jasper for protection, they merely stood by and chuckled while the mob continued their ‘dirty work.’ ”

Hundreds of similar accounts were recorded throughout the country. Along with being punched, kicked, and shot at, Witnesses were jailed without cause, fired from their jobs, and run out of their homes. And this was all a year and a half before America declared war on Germany and Japan. Marie and Gathie Barnett declined to say the Pledge barely a month after Pearl Harbor was bombed.

Thanks to Debra Basham and Midge Justice, who work for the State of West Virginia and tracked down the 1942 records, I had Slip Hill Grade School’s original address at 2389 Hampshire Drive in Charlestown. But street names have changed and the school was closed long ago, so I needed to get specific directions from Marie.

“Is that far from where you live now?” I asked her during our first conversation.

“Only a few miles away.”

“Do you ever go back, like, for nostalgic reasons?”

“No,” Marie replied without elaborating.

I invited her to come along with me, but Marie politely declined, telling me she had to tend to her husband, who was recuperating from an operation.

Marie’s directions are clear enough, and I drive up to what I believe to be 2389 Hampshire. But apparently it’s been so long since Marie has passed by here that even she didn’t know Slip Hill has been razed, and there’s nothing left but a gravel parking lot. I walk up to an AFL-CIO hall that sits close to where the school should be and ask a young woman inside if I have the right address.

“That’s where the building used to be,” she says, “before they tore it down. People thought it was an eyesore.”

I’m tempted to remark that the empty space there now isn’t exactly a thing of beauty, but I know it’s not her fault that the school was leveled.

Marie couldn’t recall in detail what happened the first day she and Gathie refused to say the Pledge, except that her teacher was quietly supportive but the principal would have none of it. For almost a month Marie and her sister walked a quarter of a mile to school each day, only to be turned away when they confirmed that, no, they hadn’t changed their minds. “We were perfectly willing to stand there respectfully while the other students recited the Pledge, which we had done before,” Marie said, “but the principal ordered us home every time.”

Stare decisis, from the Latin
dictum stare decisis et quieta non movere
(meaning “to stand by and adhere to decisions and not disturb what is settled”), is Supreme Court gospel. Constantly overturning precedents is unwise, the reasoning goes, because it leads to judicial mayhem, and justices are especially averse to rehashing recently decided cases. But in light of the violent aftermath of
Gobitis
, the Court believed a second look was in order, and
West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette
was their opportunity for another chance at bat. (The extra
e
in Barnette was a mistake; as with the Gobitas family, the lower courts botched the name. I asked Marie if she thought the misspellings were an intentional slight. “No,” she said. “I have relatives who write Barnett with an
e
at the end.”)

Oral arguments were conducted on March 11, 1943, with Hayden Covington defending the Barnetts and two other families listed on the docket, McClure and Stull. Covington had served as lead counsel for several dozen major rulings involving Jehovah’s Witnesses, many of
which had broad implications that expanded freedom of speech, worship, and assembly rights to all Americans.

The
Barnette
decision came down three months later. Justices Stanley Reed and Owen Roberts saw no reason to overturn
Gobitis
, nor did they think it necessary to articulate why. Neither man contributed a written opinion.

Justices Hugo Black and William Douglas had also been in the majority for
Gobitis
but reversed themselves in
Barnette
. “Words uttered under coercion are proof of loyalty to nothing but self-interest,” they wrote in a joint opinion. “Love of country must spring from willing hearts and free minds, inspired by a fair administration of wise laws enacted by the people’s elected representatives within the bounds of express constitutional prohibitions.”

Justice Robert Jackson, who had joined the Court only two years before, believed that
Gobitis
should be overturned, and he tackled Justice Frankfurter’s “national unity is the basis of national security” argument head-on.

“National unity as an end which officials may foster by persuasion and example is not in question,” Jackson wrote. “The problem is whether under our Constitution compulsion as here employed is a permissible means for its achievement.” He then expounded on the slippery slope to which this coercion could lead:

Notoriously combative, Frankfurter dug in his heels, defended
Gobitis
, and responded with the longest and most impassioned of the
Barnette
opinions. Perhaps stung by criticism after
Gobitis
that, as a Jew, he should be more sympathetic to minority faiths, Frankfurter began on a rare—for any justice—personal note:

Frankfurter went on to stress his firm belief in judicial self-restraint, that the Supreme Court should not behave like “a super-legislature” subverting elected officials and the people’s will. “Before a duly enacted law can be judicially nullified,” he wrote, “it must be forbidden by some explicit restriction upon political authority in the Constitution.” Requiring students to affirm their allegiance to America did not, he believed, run counter to any such restriction.

Ultimately Frankfurter’s arguments lost out, and with newcomer Wiley Rutledge joining the majority,
Gobitis
was overturned 6–3. By sheer coincidence, the decision was announced on June 14—Flag Day.
After visiting Slip Hill, I phone Marie to ask her what happened when she heard the news.

“Where were you when you found out that you’d won the case?”

“Our lawyers called my dad, and he told us. We never went to the Supreme Court ourselves. I’m not sure at that age I even knew much about it. We hadn’t gotten to that part of our schooling then.”

“What’s it like knowing you’re part of a historic ruling like that?”

“I’m proud we stood up for our rights. I hope it paved the way for others, so they wouldn’t have to go through what we did.”

The two Barnett sisters went back to school, where they were top students. Marie eventually worked for an insurance company while also raising four children. She now has seven grandchildren and thirteen great-grandchildren.

“In retrospect would you do it all again?”

“Absolutely,” she says.

I don’t know if she’ll take this as bad news or not, but I tell her the school isn’t there anymore. “I did, however, find some small pieces of red bricks scattered about and picked up a few as keepsakes. I’d be happy to send you some, if you’re interested.” Since my earlier mention of the building didn’t elicit positive memories, I expect Marie to say no.

“That would be nice. Thank you.”

Of course, I’m the one indebted to Marie for sharing her memories, which shed light on a Supreme Court ruling I knew almost nothing about and, indirectly, introduced me to the surprising evolution of the Pledge of Allegiance itself.

The original 1892 version was first published in a wildly popular magazine called
The Youth’s Companion
, and it made no mention of God; Francis Bellamy, the socialist minister who authored it, initially wrote: “I pledge allegiance to my Flag and the Republic for which it stands: one Nation indivisible, with Liberty and Justice for all.” And while Bellamy was by all accounts a patriotic man, creating a “Pledge of Allegiance” was the brainstorm of
The Youth’s Companion
’s promotional wizard, James Upham.

Several weeks later, Bellamy added a “to” before “the Republic” because
he thought it sounded better. In 1923 “my Flag” was altered to “the flag of the United States” and “of America” was tacked on a year later.

In 1942 a major change was made to the gesture that accompanied the Pledge. Traditionally, after students recited the words, they stretched their right arm straight out and at a raised angle, giving what was known as “the Bellamy salute.” Small problem: This looked awfully Nazi-ish, so students were encouraged to place their hands over their heart instead.

“Under God” was included by an act of Congress in 1954. President Dwight D. Eisenhower enthusiastically signed the bill and proclaimed that the new addition would “strengthen those spiritual weapons which forever will be our country’s most powerful resource, in peace or in war.” Ike’s words were a verbal volley aimed directly at the Soviet Union and “godless communists” everywhere.

Francis Bellamy had considered including “equality” along with “liberty and justice for all” in the original Pledge, but decided that in an era—the late nineteenth century—when segregation and other forms of racial discrimination were legal, the United States wasn’t ready for something so radical.

Almost two generations later, during World War II, millions of minority troops were risking their lives overseas fighting for freedoms denied to them back home, prompting both black and white Americans to ask with growing impatience when their country
would
be ready to embrace equal rights. And some, like the woman whose spontaneous act of defiance against segregation would bring me to an old jailhouse in the South, were refusing to wait any longer.

AN AFRICAN AMERICAN
woman riding on a bus is told to relinquish her seat for a white passenger. She says no. The driver warns her that if she doesn’t move, she’ll be arrested. The woman stays put, and the driver summons local police, who throw her in jail. Her case sparks a lawsuit that eventually helps bring an end to de jure discrimination on buses across the country and galvanizes early civil rights advocates. To the general public, however, she remains virtually unknown.

Her name was Irene Morgan, and on July 16, 1944, she boarded
a Maryland-bound Greyhound Bus in Gloucester, Virginia. Twenty-seven years old, Morgan had suffered a miscarriage a few days earlier and scheduled an appointment with her family doctor back in Baltimore, where she had been raised. Morgan sat four rows from the rear in the “Colored” section and was minding her own business when the bus stopped just outside of Saluda, Virginia, to pick up a white couple. No empty seats were available, so the driver ordered Morgan onto her feet. Feeling ill and not wanting to stand the remainder of the trip, she wouldn’t budge. “This is my seat,” Morgan said. “Why should I?”

Upon entering Saluda, the driver pulled over and called the sheriff. An officer came onto the bus and issued Morgan a warrant, which she ripped up and tossed out the window. At that point a deputy grabbed her, causing Morgan to kick him, she later recounted, “in a very bad place.” Then, she said: “He hobbled off, and another one came on. He was trying to put his hands on me to get me off. I was going to bite him, but he was dirty, so I clawed him instead. I ripped his shirt. We were both pulling at each other. He said he’d use his nightstick. I said, ‘We’ll whip each other.’ ”

Forcibly dragged out of the bus and onto the street, Morgan was locked up in Saluda’s jail. All of this occurred eleven years before Rosa Parks famously refused to surrender her seat on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama.