Barnette: Important Passages

Before Tinker, Barnette made clear that public school students have free speech rights within the schoolhouse gates. This is a very important student speech case!

West Virginia State Board of Education mandated "that all teachers and pupils 'shall be required to participate in the salute honoring the Nation represented by the Flag; provided, however, that refusal to salute the Flag be regarded as an act of insubordination, and shall be dealt with accordingly." 

Students who refused to salute the flag were expelled from school, they were treated as "unlawfully absent" and "may be proceeded against as a delinquent and their parents were lible to prosecution and possible jail sentences. 

The Court struck down the mandatory pledge and Justice Jackson wrote one of the most iconic opinions in Supreme Court history. Here are some important excerpts:

1. " To sustain the compulsory flag salute we are required to say that a Bill of Rights which guards the individual's right to speak his own mind, left it open to public authorities to compel him to utter what is not in his mind."

2. " As first and moderate methods to attain unity have failed, those bent on its accomplishment must resort to an ever-increasing severity. As governmental pressure toward unity becomes greater, so strife becomes more bitter as to whose unity it shall be. Probably no deeper division of our people could proceed from any provocation than from finding it necessary to choose what doctrine and whose program public educational officials shall compel youth to unite in embracing. Ultimate futility of such attempts to compel coherence is the lesson  of every such effort from the Roman drive to stamp out Christianity as a disturber of its pagan unity, the Inquisition, as a means to religious and dynastic unity, the Siberian exiles as a means to Russian unity, down to the fast failing efforts of our present totalitarian enemies. Those who begin coercive elimination of dissent soon find themselves exterminating dissenters. Compulsory unification of opinion achieves only the unanimity of the graveyard."

3. " 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. If there are any circumstances which permit an exception, they do not now occur to us"

4. Edited from your opinion is this:

 The Court acknowledged explicitly that an important purpose of freedom of speech under the First Amendment is to nip authoritarian government in the bud by denying tyrants—including what Jackson called “village tyrants”—the power to “coerce uniformity of sentiment” by compelling flag salutes or other affirmations of belief.  

What is a village tyrant? Has anyone run in to a village tyrant?

In Barnette, the village tyrants were public school officials expelling students who refused to salute the flag.

Who are some other petty tyrants?