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Today in History: The U.S. Supreme Court Rejects Religious Instruction in Public Schools
03/08/10
On March 8, 1948, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a landmark ruling that upheld the Constitutional principle of separation of church and state. In the case of McCollum v. Board of Education, the justices ruled 8-1 that religious instruction in public schools violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. (We are unable to display the text of the document at this time. To view the text of the decision, please visit this website: http://supreme.justia.com/us/333/203/case.html.)
McCollum v. Board of Education originated in 1940, when a group of religious leaders from Champaign, Illinois, formed an organization called the Council on Religious Education. With the support of the Champaign Board of Education, members of the council began offering religious instruction in the city’s public schools. Although the classes were voluntary, they were held in regular classrooms during school hours. Students who did not wish to attend the classes were required to go somewhere else to pursue secular studies.
Vashti McCollum, an atheist and the mother of a student in the district, opposed the classes and claimed that her child was ostracized for refusing to participate. She filed a lawsuit in 1945 in hopes of forcing the Board of Education to discontinue the program. After two lower courts ruled in favor of the school district, McCollum appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which found the religious instruction unconstitutional. The majority opinion, written by Justice Hugo Black, declared that the Champaign program “beyond question [represented] a utilization of the tax-established and tax-supported public school system to aid religious groups and to spread the faith.”