Source: https://archive.triblive.com/local/westmoreland/13499781-74/jehovahs-witnesses-legal-battles-in-western-pennsylvania-laid-groundwork-for-religious-freedoms
Timestamp: 2019-04-20 17:03:45+00:00

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Sun., May 13, 2018 12:48 a.m. | Sunday, May 13, 2018 12:48 a.m.
A Jehovah's Witnesses 'sound car' used in evangelistic campaigns in the 1930s. The speakers helped broadcast the religious sect's teachings and upcoming meetings in Greater Pittsburgh.
Don Peters, an elder at the Greensburg Kingdom Hall, explains the new literature racks used by Jehovah's Witnesses in their evangelistic work. When going door-to-door, Witnesses no longer solicit donations for their literature.
Don Peters, an elder at the Greensburg Kingdom Hall, describes the Westmoreland County territory assigned to the Greensburg congregation for its evangelistic work.
• Founder Charles Taze Russell was born in Allegheny City (now Pittsburgh) and is buried in Rosemont United Cemetery in Ross. Russell started the Pittsburgh Bible Class in the 1870s. The movement began calling itself Jehovah's Witnesses in the 1930s, long after moving its headquarters to Brooklyn.
• At the Pittsburgh Plate Glass Co. (now PPG) plant in Clarksburg, W.Va., seven Jehovah's Witnesses were terminated from their jobs in 1941 for alleged anti-American disloyalty �" one of the most widely reported employment discrimination cases involving Witnesses in the 1940s. Eventually reinstated, only two of the seven returned to their jobs.
• Two important Supreme Court cases on religious freedom (Douglas v. City of Jeannette and Murdock v. Pennsylvania) originated in Jeannette in 1939 and 1940, respectively.
• Jehovah's Witnesses minister William Estep, a native of Canonsburg, fought his military draft classification during World War II all the way to the Supreme Court (Estep v. United States). He was imprisoned for violating the Selective Service Act of 1940.
“How, then, can the Court today hold it a ‘high constitutional privilege' to go to homes, including those of devout Catholics on Palm Sunday morning, and thrust upon them literature calling their church a ‘whore' and their faith a ‘racket' ”?
In 1939, the tranquility of a Palm Sunday morning in Jeannette was broken by the arrival of more than 100 people from out of town.
They parked their 25 cars outside the city limits and set up a makeshift headquarters at a local gas station with a public telephone — just in case there was any trouble.
The people, who called themselves Jehovah’s Witnesses, descended on Jeannette starting about 9 a.m. — as residents were preparing for Palm Sunday services — and began knocking on doors. It didn’t take long for the phone to start ringing at the police office, according to the court record.
In total, 21 Witnesses were arrested for violating a 40-year-old city ordinance requiring solicitors to obtain a permit before going door-to-door. Among them was a man named Robert L. Douglas.
Facing a fine of up to $100 or a jail sentence of up to 30 days, Douglas appealed his conviction, arguing that the city’s permit requirement was an unconstitutional violation of his First Amendment rights. By 1943, the appeal had made its way to the Supreme Court under the name Douglas v. City of Jeannette.
The wave of Palm Sunday arrests did not dissuade the Witnesses from returning to Jeannette the following year. Buoyed by years of hostility from local authorities and the general public, Jehovah’s Witnesses were nothing if not tenacious in their approach to evangelism. This time, eight people, including Robert Murdock Jr., were arrested.
Their legal challenge, titled Murdock v. Pennsylvania, arrived at the Supreme Court at the same time as the Douglas case from the preceding year. In May, the justices released four decisions, consolidating 13 cases, pertaining to the rights of Jehovah’s Witnesses to proselytize and disseminate literature.
Twelve of the 13 cases went in their favor — an unprecedented victory for the small, beleaguered sect — making that day 75 years ago a seminal one not only for Jehovah’s Witnesses but also for anyone who invokes the First Amendment guarantee of religious freedom, experts say.
The Jeannette cases, especially Murdock’s, helped shape the body of law that continues to define the scope of religious free exercise to this day, said Holly Hollman, general counsel of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty.
The Witnesses are credited with winning at least 30 major cases involving religious liberty issues since 1938. As recently as 2002, the Supreme Court, in Watchtower Bible & Tract Society of N.Y. Inc. v. Village of Stratton (Ohio), reaffirmed 8-1 its finding in Murdock that permit requirements for religious door-to-door canvassing violate the First Amendment.
Hollman said that in the 1930s, Jehovah’s Witnesses developed an assertive legal strategy to match their assertive evangelistic practices — practices that were often misunderstood and challenged, even attacked.
Those clashes turned violent in 1940, as Jehovah’s Witnesses came under attack for refusing to say the Pledge of Allegiance or salute the American flag. Bolstered by the Supreme Court case Minersville v. Gobitis, which upheld a Schuylkill County school district’s flag salute requirement, communities resorted to violence against Witnesses and their Kingdom Halls.
“There’s no question that between the 1930s and ’40s, there were people trying to make it appear that our ministry was criminal, illegal, even subversive,” said Don Peters, an elder with the Greensburg Kingdom Hall.
Peters, 79, of Delmont said local child Witnesses who were expelled from public schools for not saluting the flag ended up going to an ad hoc Kingdom School in the village of Gates in German Township, Fayette County.
Meanwhile, adult Witnesses were scorned by communities for their alleged lack of patriotism and for confrontational evangelistic methods, including the use of record players and “sound cars” that broadcast the message in neighborhoods.
“Religious minorities always face an uphill battle in this country, even though this country was founded on religious liberty,” he said.
Peters begins the book by recounting an anti-Jehovah’s Witnesses riot in Imperial, Allegheny County, in the summer of 1942. The incident, documented by the American Civil Liberties Union at the time, resulted in several Witnesses being beaten, and their property damaged, when they refused to salute the flag.
Such incidents were repeated in dozens of communities as the country, preparing to enter World War II, feared a “fifth column” of homegrown Nazi sympathizers, he said. By the time the Supreme Court overturned its controversial Minersville decision in 1943, the violence had died down.
Peters calls Jehovah’s Witnesses the “unlikely heroes” of the 20th century fight for civil liberties by minorities in the United States — their record of litigation before the Supreme Court being matched only by the NAACP.

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