Focusing On Religious Freedom

Robert H. Jackson Center To Hold Seminar On Key Religious Freedom Case

C E N T E R

Where: Robert H. Jackson Center, 305 E. Fourth St.

When: 10:30 a.m. Friday, April 28

The public is asked to please arrive in seats by 10 a.m. For more information, call 483-6646.

   The Robert H. Jackson Center will focus on a key religious freedom case from Justice Jackson’s term on the court during a seminar at 10:30 a.m. Friday.

   The public is invited at no charge, but is asked to arrive in their seats in the Carl Cappa Auditorium by 10 a.m. as the program will be recorded on video for possible rebroadcast on C-SPAN. The event is co-sponsored by the Supreme Court Historical Society of Washington, D.C.

  Other sponsors of the program to date include: HSBC Bank USA, Lloyd & Company, Serta Mattress of Jamestown, Young Title Company, Allegheny Financial Assets, the Jamestown Bar Association, Jamestown Chamber of Commerce, Jamestown Community College and The Post-Journal.

  The program concentrates on the case of West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, U.S. 624 of 1943. John Q. Barrett, Elizabeth S. Lenna Fellow and St. John’s University Law School professor, will conduct a living room panel discussion with the Barnette sisters for whom the case was named and with Bennett Boskey, Supreme Court Law Clerk to Chief Justice Harlan Stone. Shawn Francis Peters, author of Judging Jehovah’s Witnesses, will provide historical background prior to the discussion group.

  The Barnette decision, rendered amid the patriotism of the home front in the middle of World War II, invalidated a West Virginia State Board of Education resolution that required all schoolteachers and students to participate in a flag salute and recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance.

  The case was brought on behalf of students who were Jehovah’s Witnesses. In respect to their belief that the Bible forbade them to bow down to graven images, the students refused to salute the flag and, for that refusal, were expelled from school, making them unlawfully absent. The Jehovah Witness children were subjected to delinquency proceedings and their parents to criminal prosecution.

  The Supreme Court held, 6-3, that the state’s flag salute requirement violated the children’s First Amendment rights, which exist to strengthen individual freedom of mind in preference to officially disciplined uniformity. Justice Jackson wrote the Supreme Court’s opinion and his writing on the decision is considered among his finest work.

  The two Barnette sisters are Gathie Edmonds and Marie Snodgrass, still residents of West Virginia.

  Professor Barrett is a Jackson authority who is writing books and articles about Jackson, a Jamestown attorney who went on to become a Supreme Court Justice and the Chief American Prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials following World War II. Barrett has conducted several discussions at the center featuring law clerks to Justice Jackson and Jackson’s fellow Nuremberg prosecutors.

  Peters, the author of Judging Jehovah’s Witnesses, by the University Press of Kansas, has taught writing and rhetoric at the universities of New Hampshire and Iowa and is with the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Wisconsin- Madison.

  The Supreme Court Historical Society serves the Supreme Court, the legal profession, historians and the public. The society is a private, not-for-profit organization dedicated to the preservation and dissemination of historical information about the Supreme Court of the United States through educational programs, publications, scholarship and the acquisition of court-related artifacts.

The Post-Journal

April 22, 2006

Vol. 179, No. 305

Section E, Page 1