Penn was resolute; he refused to submit. The “prison shall be my grave before I will budge a jot, for I owe my conscience to no mortal man,”6 he said. He petitioned the king for an audience—it was the king himself who signed the warrant putting Penn in prison—but was denied. After eight months, he was finally released. Liberated from captivity, many in Penn’s shoes would seek the shadows, hoping to avoid any future altercations. Most people prefer to go on living their lives, but not Penn, who committed to continuing his fight against the Church and the Crown.
It was not easy to be a Quaker in England during Penn’s time. Their refusal to recognize authority and active preaching of a different doctrine were met with hostility, and numerous laws were passed that allowed for the arrest and persecution of Quakers. Dozens had died in prison, and countless others were crippled or made sick through maltreatment; thousands of them were imprisoned for their religious beliefs. Quakers were whipped, publicly humiliated, stripped naked, fined, and had their property confiscated.
Penn himself was arrested several times on charges of illegal preaching and “inciting a riot”—code for discussing things the government doesn’t like. And these instances weren’t accidental or unwelcome. In fact, Penn directly provoked one of the laws in order to challenge it. The 1664 Conventicle Act prohibited the gathering of “more than five persons… for any religious purpose not according to the rules of the Church of England.”7 In effect, this prohibition outlawed religious meetings of, and preaching by, any who had nonconformist religious views, such as the Quakers.
In 1670, Penn and another Quaker, William Mead, preached their faith to an assembled crowd of around 300 outside Grace Church in London. The jury in Penn’s resulting court case refused to convict him—even though they had been instructed to come to a decision without hearing Penn’s defense of his actions. Many jurors felt strongly about the injustice of the law itself. They returned a verdict of guilt only in “speaking at Grace Church,” which was not itself illegal. The panel of judges was furious, leading the presiding judge to tell the jury:
Gentlemen, you shall not be dismissed until we have a verdict that the court will accept; and you shall be locked up without meat, drink, fire, or tobacco. You shall not think thus to abuse the court. We will have a verdict by the help of God, or you shall starve for it.8
The judges repeatedly sequestered the jury, and once denied them food and water, in hopes of a different result, but each time the same verdict was rendered for the alleged crime: not guilty. Finally, in frustration at the jury’s defiance, the judges put Penn in jail and the entire jury was forced to join him—each of whom was fined nearly a year’s wages for going against the court’s wishes.
While Penn was sitting in jail once again, his father was dying. Penn wanted to see his father in hopes of reconciling their rocky relationship, but encouraged him, in a letter, “not to purchase my liberty” by paying the fine. But his father refused, probably worried he might not see his son before dying, and Penn was released. Interestingly, the jurors fought their unjust imprisonment and won a legal challenge that created a judicial precedent (or rule) that has remained in place ever since, including in America: juries are independent of the court and cannot be punished for their decision. Penn’s provocation of the law, and his stubborn defense of his rights, has protected religious liberty and the independence of the jury for millions who followed him.
This hero, later a founding father, was not content to submit; he did not passively accept the “rule of law.” He recognized a wrong and fought against it, being willing to openly violate the unjust mandate in order to legally challenge it. Penn wasn’t trying to quietly break the law for his own gain, sneaking around to avoid detection—he used civil disobedience as a vehicle to educate the masses and put the tyranny of church and state on display for all to see.
He even won over his father. Having now gained some respect for Penn’s integrity and courage, he told his son in a letter, “Let nothing in this world tempt you to wrong your conscience.”9
A decade later in America, Penn began drafting a charter of liberties for the newly settled land he was given under a charter from the king to settle a debt with his father and provide a place where Quakers could emigrate in order to reduce tensions in England. Not surprisingly, this charter guaranteed a fair trial by jury, freedom of religion, and freedom from unjust imprisonment.
HELMUTH HüBENER
As a young boy in Germany during the mid-1900s, Helmuth Hübener joined the local scouting chapter of the Boy Scouts—an organization supported by the Mormon church to which he belonged. As it was an international organization, the rising regime of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, the “Nazis,” eventually prohibited participation within the country. Hitler Youth activities became mandatory instead.
Having grown up in a dysfunctional family that was not political, young Helmuth was not inherently opposed to what he encountered in the Hitler Youth. According to one of his best friends, he “was quite enthused at the beginning,” though another friend suggests that Helmuth’s apparent support for the program was to “put up a smoke screen so others would not see his real convictions.”10 We will never know and can only speculate. Why? Because Helmuth was executed by the Nazi state—beheaded in prison—at the age of 17. He was the youngest enemy of the Third Reich to be sentenced to death and executed.
Helmuth’s negative opinion of the Nazis developed due to personal observations of what was occurring in his community. For example, one friend recalls a confrontation in the street with a Hitler Youth patrol as Helmuth and his buddies were singing some American songs. The uniformed youth stopped the boys, demanding to know why they were singing those songs. “Why shouldn’t we sing them?” Helmuth said. “It’s not against the law! Talking about the law, what right do you have to harass German citizens on the street? You’ve not been given the authority of a policeman to question people!”11 The Hitler Youth group backed down and departed, but Helmuth wasn’t finished sounding off about what had happened:
That’s the trouble with these people—put them in a uniform and they think they have the authority to bully people around…. Our country is being run through threats, intimidation, and even brutal force! And something has to be done about this!12
On September 1, 1939, Germany started World War II by invading Poland. On the same day, Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels announced the “Extraordinary Radio Measures” decree. Anyone caught listening to a foreign radio station would be put in prison, and distributing information derived from foreign broadcasts was made punishable by death. To satisfy the public’s desire for information about the war, the Nazis mass-produced inexpensive radio receivers with a short reception range and only a few channels—ones controlled by the state. Germans called one of the models the Goebbels-Schnauze, or Goebbels’s snout.
But Helmuth wanted real information, and he knew that he wouldn’t get it from domestic sources. So, he committed the only real crime of his short life by breaking into a locked cabinet in his grandparents’ apartment to retrieve a more powerful radio belonging to his half-brother who was away fighting in the war. Helmuth, 16 years old at the time, invited his friends over to join him. The group of young men listened intently, riveted by the information they were hearing from forbidden sources. And for Helmuth’s part, he was quickly convinced that what he was hearing was truthful. As one example, the British Broadcasting Corporation’s updates would list the losses of British troops, aircraft, and ships, while the Nazis never shared information of their weakness or defeat with German citizens, presumably in an effort to appear strong and victorious—to keep up a charade, deceiving the public.
Passive listening quickly turned to active resistance—after all, Helmuth felt “something has to be done.” The teenager began illegally producing leaflets that appeared to be imprinted with an official Nazi Party stamp. One was titled Down with Hitler and, rather than calling H
itler the Volksführer (“people’s leader”), he used Volksverführer, the people’s seducer. Helmuth also called Hitler the “people’s corruptor” and the “people’s traitor.”13 One of his friends shared how they began spreading Helmuth’s leaflets:
He gave me a handbill, about one quarter of the size of a sheet of typing paper, and asked me to read it. Entitled, “Hitler the Murderer,” … I told him the pamphlet looked great, particularly because it was printed on red paper. “Then let’s go to work,” Helmuth replied. He handed me a stack of leaflets and said, “Put them in mailboxes, telephone booths, and other places—be inventive.” I went [to an apartment building] and began dropping off the handbills in the mailboxes… I covered about three apartment houses before my supply ran out. I distributed about thirty to thirty-five handbills that night.14
To some it may have appeared that the youthful rebels considered this a sort of adrenaline-fueled game. One of Helmuth’s friends noted “the excitement of doing something secretive,” a feeling similar to one they experienced years prior when the group worked together as a made-up “Lord Lister Detective Agency” to ascertain the guilt of people whose stories they read in the paper. But for Helmuth, this resistance was serious business: he wanted to start a revolution. For several months, he and his two friends carried out a propaganda campaign against the establishment, hoping to distribute enough contradictory information that their fellow Germans would help oppose the Nazis.
Based on the Gestapo’s archive, Helmuth wrote 29 pamphlets, sometimes with different audiences in mind. For example, in one that targeted members of the Hitler Youth after the announcement of a new, severe disciplinary policy for any insubordination, Helmuth wrote the following:
So this is the Hitler Youth, praised far and wide. A compulsory organization of the first order for recruiting Nazi-enslaved national comrades. Hitler and his accomplices know that they must deprive you of your free will at the beginning, in order to make submissive, spineless creatures out of you… “You are the future of Germany,” they will tell you, but then you are tyrannized and punished for any little offense.15
Can you imagine yourself, at age 16, writing such material and going to such great lengths to distribute it? Even more surprisingly, despite his friends growing increasingly nervous about their efforts, Helmuth never showed any signs of fear. He knew there was work to be done.
He didn’t succeed. Nine years of the Nazi regime’s rule, and two years of war, produced indifference—not activism—among the German population. Helmuth and his friends may have reached a sympathetic few, but there was never any uprising. Their effort came to a halt when, in an effort to expand their ranks by soliciting help from other teens, they were overheard and caught. The Gestapo arrested Helmuth Hübener.
Along with other subversives, Helmuth and his friends would be tried for their supposed crimes before the infamous People’s Court. This court was sometimes referred to as the “Blood Tribunal” because around 90% of the cases heard before the court during the final years of Nazi rule resulted in a death sentence or life imprisonment.16 Set up outside of the country’s constitutional framework as a “special court”—Hitler unilaterally created it after being displeased with the results of the regular court of law—the ruling judge often acted as the prosecutor, criticized defendants, and pronounced his verdict and the sentence without the defendant even speaking.
A group that tried to assassinate Hitler was brought before this court, and when the high-profile participants tried to mount a defense, they were shouted down or forced to shut up. In contrast, young 17-year-old Helmuth had no public significance or standing, but he refused to be silenced. His friends, awaiting their fate, recall their friend and leader standing up to the President Judge and shouting, “You have sentenced me to death for telling the truth. My time is now—but your time will come!”
While his friends were sentenced to a few years in prison, allowing them to survive the war and live to an old age, Helmuth was declared guilty of conspiracy to commit high treason against the Third Reich. It was very unusual for the Nazis to prosecute an underage defendant such as Helmuth, but the court argued that the young rebel had shown more than average intelligence for a boy of his age.
In addition to being sentenced to death, Helmuth was also stripped of his civil rights, enabling his captors to mistreat him in prison. He was denied bedding and blankets in a cold cell, where he awaited his fate for two months. A red poster announcing his fate, written in large black writing, was posted in public to announce the scheduled beheading—a warning to the local population against following in the young man’s footsteps.
The sole surviving letter Helmuth wrote from prison was to a fellow church member. “I know that God lives and He will be the Just Judge in this matter,” Helmuth wrote on the day of his death. “I look forward to seeing you in a better world!”17
ROSA PARKS
Following her parents’ separation in 1915, Rosa McCauley spent much of her childhood on her grandparent’s farm in Alabama with her brother. Born into a family of African descent, Rosa remembers being adversely affected by the Jim Crow laws implemented in southern states—government mandates that separated white people from black people in much of their daily lives. Public restrooms, drinking fountains, schools, transportation—these and other daily doings were racially split, and the divisions were enforced by law.
Rosa recalls gaining the understanding at age six that black people like her were “actually not free.” One memory she shared in her autobiography illustrates how her grandfather reacted to the Ku Klux Klan—a violent group of white supremacists:
At one point the violence was so bad that my grandfather kept his gun—a double barreled shotgun—close by at all times. And I remember we talked about how just in case the Klansmen broke into our house, we should go to bed with our clothes on so we would be ready to run if we had to. I remember my grandfather saying, “I don’t know how long I would last if they came breaking in here, but I’m getting the first one who comes through the door.”18
Even from a young age, Rosa had developed a defiant streak. When she was around 10 years old, a white boy insulted and threatened to punch her. She picked up a brick and dared him to hit her. Not surprisingly, the boy opted to leave her alone. On another occasion, a white boy on roller skates purposefully bumped into her, hoping to knock her off a sidewalk. She turned around and pushed him, resulting in the boy’s mother, who saw the altercation, threatening to have young Rosa arrested and jailed for pushing her son. Rosa, who had a strong sense of fairness and justice, wouldn’t stand for that—she forcefully objected, pointing out that she had not bothered the boy before being pushed by him.19
Both schools and the transportation methods to get the children to them were segregated. Rosa lived near a white school but was required to walk a greater distance to the Mount Zion AME Church, where she and about 60 other black students were taught in a one-room schoolhouse by a single teacher. The white children had a new brick schoolhouse, paid for by taxpayers, that was fully heated and featured separate rooms and teachers for each grade level. White children were given a bus to ride; black children had to walk. And as the bus passed the black kids heading to school, the white ones would sometimes throw trash at them.20
This racial separation continued throughout much of Rosa’s adult life, especially after she married Raymond Parks, a barber who was active in Civil Rights movement. Now known as Rosa Parks, she joined the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and became secretary to the organization’s president. Rosa began working at the Maxwell Air Force Base in 1944—a federally owned facility in which segregation was not allowed. This was Rosa’s first time experiencing equality between blacks and whites, and it changed her. “You might just say Maxwell opened my eyes up,” she later recalled.21
A decade later, fatigued from the effects of legalized racism every single day in her community, Rosa invoked th
e defiant attitude of her youth to deal with the injustice that faced her on a bus ride home from work on December 1, 1955. At the time, black people were required to sit in the back seats to allow whites to sit up front. The seats allocated for whites were full, so the driver moved the “colored” sign back one row to free up four more seats for white passengers.
Rosa was sitting in that row of seats. The three other black passengers moved, but Rosa did not. The driver asked her why she wasn’t standing up, to which she replied, “I don’t think I should have to stand up.” This resistance—both to established law and cultural practice—was thought by some in later years to be a result of Rosa merely being too tired to get up and move. “That isn’t true,” she wrote in her autobiography. “I was not tired physically… No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.”22
Two police officers approached the stopped bus and, after reviewing the situation, arrested Rosa for her refusal to cooperate with the law. “Why do you push us around?” she asked one of the officers. He replied: “I don’t know, but the law’s the law.”23 Rosa was booked into jail and briefly incarcerated. She was allowed to call her husband, but by then word of her arrest had quickly spread. A civil rights activist named E.D. Nixon heard about her arrest and was waiting for Rosa later that evening when she was released. For several years, Nixon had been trying to find a courageous black person who was honest and of good character to become the plaintiff in a court case to challenge the constitutionality of segregation laws. That day, he had found his plaintiff in Rosa Parks.24
Four days later, during her trial, Nixon and his allies organized a boycott of all buses in Montgomery, Alabama. Tens of thousands of fliers had been circulated announcing the plans, and when Rosa Parks was found guilty of violating the segregation laws and fined $14, African-Americans in her community stood in solidarity with her. Nixon and some local pastors used the momentum from the boycott to form the Montgomery Improvement Association. A new arrival in town, a reverend just 26 years old, was elected as the organization’s president. His name was Martin Luther King Jr.25
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