On May 9, I will hold a white rose at noon at the intersection of King and Main streets in Northampton.

I will hold the rose to remember the birthday of Sophie Magdalena Scholl, a key member of Weiße Rose (White Rose).

Who were the White Rose? In the United States, Scholl and her classmates and fellow members are not well known. But in Germany, May 9 is a day for Germans to honor Scholl and the tiny group of German college students from Munich who shared a loathing of Adolph Hitler and the Nazi regime.

In Nazi Germany, they did the unthinkable: they printed up and handed out inflammatory leaflets and spread political graffiti that criticized Hitler and urged Germans to oppose their government.

“Our German name will always be in disgrace if we, the youth of Germany, do not rise and deal with our oppressors,” said one of the leaflets.

In 1940s Germany, political dissent was an incredibly dangerous pursuit, but the students continued to brazenly distribute literature. It all came to a halt on Feb. 18, 1943, when 21-year-old Sophie and her older brother, Hans Scholl, were caught. A collaborator, Christopher Probst, was arrested soon afterward.

All three were guillotined for high treason. Hans’ last words before they were beheaded were “Long live freedom!” On the back of her indictment the day before, Sophie wrote “Freiheit” — Freedom.

Without its leaders, the White Rose ceased it activities, but Nazi retaliation against their movement did not end. The Gestapo would arrest 14 more people associated with the group. Three more people were executed, including Alexander Schmorell, one of the movement’s founding members. The others were given prison sentences.

Though I studied German history and World War II in college, I knew nothing of the White Rose movement until the 1990s when I was stationed in Germany and learned about the movement at a museum.

Today, the White Rose movement is venerated throughout Germany. There are plazas, squares, schools and streets named after their members. The White Rose has inspired at least two movies, an opera and several books.

For me, the White Rose’s greatest legacy is the righteousness of peaceful nonviolence and civil disobedience. Their example transcends Germany and speaks to me today, more than ever before.

After they were arrested and after four days of unrelenting interrogation, the three students were brought to a sham trial. The defendants sat calmly as the judge, a notorious Nazi jurist, assailed them and asked how any good German could do what they did.

“Somebody, after all, had to make a start,” said Sophie Scholl on behalf of her brother and Probst. “What we wrote and said is believed by many others. They just don’t dare express themselves as we did.”

So on May 9, I will lift a white rose in honor of Sophie Scholl, her brother Hans and all the members who fought fascism, and I will call on you, reader, to join me if you can and if you can’t, to pledge to continue to resist, in the spirit of the White Rose.

The reason couldn’t be clearer. Whether it be 1940s Nazi Germany or today’s MAGA America, the good side of history relies on good people doing, as John Lewis said, “good trouble.” This has always been necessary. But it is even more necessary today.

“We never ceased wondering what more we could do,” Inge Scholl, the sister of Hans and Sophie, would say later. “We may seem, in retrospect, to have been ineffectual. But our real purpose, after all, was to let the truth be known, to tell the youth of Germany that it was being misused by the Nazis, and to give hope to the persecuted.”

In giving hope, pamphlets and leaflets and writings have always been powerful — whether it was Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense” in revolutionary Boston or coded messages passed by the underground resistance in Europe in the Second World War. Or what we say and tell our neighbors today.

On the bus ride back from Boston to Northampton after the Hands Off! rally on April 5, I looked down at a leaflet given to me by the Hands Off! organizers.

“What happens next?” it said. “The fight is just beginning, and we’re mobilizing to jumpstart the opposition. Together, we have the power to stop this takeover. Join any of the organizing and co-sponsor groups to take further action.”

In Sophie Scholl’s memory, I commit myself to this fight because freedom always relies on those with the courage to take a stand.

John Paradis is a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel. He is a member of VoteVets, a home for progressive veterans, military families and their civilian supporters. He lives in Florence.