the Supreme Court.

The Jehovah’s Witnesses first began refusing to salute national flags after the Nazis came to power in Germany in the 1930s and started demanding everyone do it. Many Witnesses refused, seeing doing so as idolatry—putting a country above God—and were beaten up for their trouble. News of the violence soon spread to America, where Witnesses also started questioning the respect they were required to show their national symbols.

In October 1935, two children from Minersville, Pennsylvania, Lillian and Billy Gobitis, agonized for weeks over whether they should say the pledge and salute the flag at their school. They mimed along for a few days, but then one afternoon Billy rushed home excited. “I stopped saluting the flag!” he told his parents, according to a fascinating account inJudging Jehovah’s Witnesses: Religious Persecution and the Dawn of the Rights Revolution. “The teacher tried to put up my arm, but I held onto my pocket.” The next day, Lillian stayed seated during the pledge. Both were soon expelled.

Their parents turned to the courts for help, but the 1940 Supreme Court ruling stopped them in their tracks. It also led to mob violence across America with Witnesses beaten, tarred and feathered, even kidnapped. Some were hanged, others forced to drink castor oil. Their businesses were boycotted and their homes set on fire. “Nothing parallel to this…has taken place since the days of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s,” the American Civil Liberties Union said at the time. The violence only calmed down after the Supreme Court reversed