Synopsis:
A Screenplay.
Based on a true story.
Story of one boy’s moving moral dilemma that rocked a nation. When a ten year old boy, in the era of the McCarthy Hearings, refuses to say the “Pledge of Allegiance” in school, social outrage threatens to tear his family and the nation apart.
“I do not salute the flag because I have promised to do the will of God,” wrote ten-year-old Billie Gobitas to the School Board in 1935. His refusal, and that of his sister Lilly (age twelve), touched off one of several constitutional legal cases delineating the tension between the authority of the state to require respect for national symbols and the right of individuals to freedom of speech.
On October 22, 1935, Billie acted on this belief and refused to participate in the daily flag salute. The next day Lilly did the same.
What came next was one of the bloodiest episodes of public violence in this nation’s history. Police joined mobs in attacking members of the religious group, cars overturned. People were beaten, run out of town, kidnapped, branded communists, tarred and feathered, jailed and denied lawyers and family contact, castrated and murdered.
The family buckles under the pressures from outside… and within. Will Billie continue to stand up for what he believes, or be forced into abandoning his beliefs in order to calm a family… and a nation?
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