Witness & Justices

For 30 years brown-faced, square-shouldered George Leoles, 48, was known by his fellow Atlantans as a useful, loyal U. S. citizen. Ace hat cleaner of smoky Atlanta, each morning he left his popular little shop opposite the Federal Reserve Bank, smilingly made the rounds of Atlanta businessmen's downtown offices picking up their dusty hats to clean. He was active in the Parent-Teacher Association of the Crew Street School, attended by his shy, 12-year-old daughter Dorothy. One day a little more than a year ago, the principal of Dorothy's school noticed she did not salute the flag when the other children did. "My father," explained the defiant little girl, "said it is a sin to salute the flag. He said the flag is an idol. If I salute the flag I cannot go to Heaven." To George Leoles' home went the principal, there learned he was a member of Jehovah's Witnesses (TIME, Nov. 18, 1935). When he refused to let his daughter obey the Atlanta Board of Education's flag salute requirement, Dorothy was dismissed from school.

Next day, as newsboys hawked George Leoles' name in the streets, he failed in his round of customers to pick up a single hat. Outside his shop marched an American Legionnaire picket. Soon a silent figure in the full regalia of the Ku Klux Klan joined the Legionnaire. George Leoles hurriedly sold his shop.

But he kept on smiling, put his daughter in a private school, was supported by Jehovah's Witnesses who sent him to the courts to seek "justice." Coercion, he pleaded from court to higher court, makes the flag salute an empty form, violates constitutional guarantees of religious liberty. Last week, still smiling but less jaunty, George Leoles said: "Some day God will show them their mistake." In Washington the U. S. Supreme Court had dismissed George Leoles' appeal "for the want of a substantial Federal question."

The Leoles case was the first involving the flag salute to reach the Supreme Court. Fortnight before, Federal Judge Albert B. Maris in Philadelphia had held a compulsory salute rule unconstitutional. Whether the highest court's ruling in the Leoles case was a final determination of the matter and doomed other pending appeals by Jehovah's Witnesses, the Witnesses' lawyers did not know, but they considered it unfavorable that in its decision the court cited the University of California case, in which it had ruled that students did not have the right to exemption from military training, in itself an act of allegiance, because of religious scruples.

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