Vashti McCollum
From Philosopedia
McCollum, Vashti Ruth (Cromwell) (6 November 1912 – 20 August 2006)
In 1945, when Vashti and Dr. John McCollum's 4th grade son, James, was pressured into participating in the school's required religious instruction, they refused to allow this. The classes were on school premises. Jews and Roman Catholics went to religious buildings elsewhere for their instruction. Vashti, as everyone called her, contended that such instruction was not only a misuse and waste of taxpayer money but also discriminated against minority faiths and was unconstitutional. In two Illinois courts, she lost but then in 1948 won an 8-to-1 decision by the Supreme Court, with Justice Hugo L. Black writing the majority opinion that described the practice in Champaign as falling "beyond all question" "squarely under the ban of the First Amendment."
The critical issue in the court case, according to Douglas Martin (The New York Times, 26 August 2006) was whether the Constitution's ban on establishing religion meant that all sects must be treated equally, as lawyers for Champaign argued was the case in their schools - or whether it required strict neutrality between belief and unbelief, Mrs. McCollum's contention. She won, with Justice Black's writing,
- The First Amendment rests upon the premise that both religion and government can best work to achieve their lofty aims if each is left free from the other in its respective sphere.
He added,
- [E]very State admitted into the Union since 1876 was compelled by Congress to write into its constitution a requirement that it maintain a school system "free from sectarian control.”
Justice Felix Frankfurter, concurring, wrote,
- Designed to serve as perhaps the most powerful agency for promoting cohesion among a heterogeneous democratic people, the public school must keep scrupulously free from entanglement in the strife of sects. . . . Separation means separation, not something less. Jefferson's metaphor in describing the relation between Church and State speaks of a "wall of separation," not a fine line easily overstepped. The public school is at once the symbol of our democracy and the most pervasive means for promoting our common destiny. In no activity of the State is it more vital to keep out divisive forces than in its schools, to avoid confusing, not to say fusing, what the Constitution sought to keep strictly apart. "The great American principle of eternal separation" - Elihu Root's phrase bears repetition - is one of the vital reliances of our Constitutional system for assuring unities among our people stronger than our diversities. It is the Court's duty to enforce this principle in its full integrity.
As a result, the case extended the First Amendment's protections to the states by using the due process clause of the much later 14th Amendment as justification - school prayer, aid to parochial schools, and sectarian religious displays on public property all were affected in the test of Jefferson's wall of "separation of church and state."
Mrs. McCollum grew up in Rochester, New York. She was named for the queen of the Persian King Xerxes depicted in the Bible's Esther I, a woman who refused to obey her husband's order and divorced because of her boldness and pluck.
Her father, architect Arthur G. Cromwell, read the works of Spinoza, Thomas Paine, and Robert Green Ingersoll as well as several different versions of the Bible and became a vocal atheist by the time his two daughters were in college. He was the founder and president of the Rochester Society of Freethinkers.
Vashti received a scholarship to Cornell but, when the family lacked funds during the Depression, she transferred to the University of Illinois, majoring in political science. It was here that she met Dr. John Paschal McCollum, a professor of vegetable crops in the horticultural department, and the two married in 1933. Later, she earned a master's degree in mass communications at the University of Illinois.
Helping during the initial trial was a local Unitarian minister, the Rev. Phillip Schug, and in Chicago a group of Jewish businessmen provided some funds and a lawyer. Church federations, however, fought it all the way. They objected to her father's saying he did not believe in God, to which her son also testified on the witness stand at the trial. The McCollums "affirmed" rather than swearing by God, and during the three-year legal battle Vashti received physical threats, was fired from her job as a dance instructor at the university, and had rotten tomatoes and cabbages thrown at their home on Halloween. Even the family cat was lynched.
Her One Woman's Fight tells how McCollum v. Board of Education, 333 U.S. 203, 212 (1948) struck down religious instruction in public schools. For example,
- Between being praised and persecuted, condoned and condemned, I might understandably have become bewildered, particularly at the brand of ethics sometimes displayed by the staunch defenders of Christianity. But of one thing I am sure: I am sure that I fought not only for what I earnestly believed to be right, but for the truest kind of religious freedom intended by the First Amendment, the complete separation of church and state.
From 1962 to 1965, she was President of the American Humanist Association, of which she previously had been a member of the Board of Directors. In 1993, McCollum spoke at the Freedom From Religion Foundation’s annual convention in Huntsville, Alabama. She is honored in the Women’s Hall of Fame in Seneca Falls, New York. McCollum signed Humanist Manifesto II.
She died in Champaign, Illinois, at the age of 93. She was survived by her sons James, Dannel, and Errol; her sister, Helen Curtis; six grandchildren, and six great-grandchildren.
The Marker Citing the Successful Supreme Court Victory
{FFRF; FUS; HM2; HNS; HNS2; WAS, conversations; WWS; the above information has been verified on 27 February 2007 by Dr. James T. McCollum, Mrs. McCollum's eldest son, the subject of the landmark case.}
