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Illinois
ex rel. McCollum v. Board of Education
333
U.S. 203 (1948)
The
Rothgerber Johnson & Lyons Religious Institutions
Group gratefully acknowledges the contribution of the
Ethics and Public Policy Center which provided the following case commentary taken from Terry Eastland, Religious
Liberty in the Supreme Court: The Cases That Define
the Debate over Church and State (1993).
A
year after its decision in Everson v. Board of Education
(1947) the Supreme Court acted under the principles of that
case to invalidate, for the first time ever, a state practice
on grounds that it established religion. An avowed atheist,
Vashti McCollum, had challenged her local (Champaign, Illinois)
school board's "released time" program under which teachers
from all religious groups choosing to participate were allowed
to offer religious instruction in the school for one hour
once a week. Students in grades four to nine had the option
of attending the religion class of their choice (as approved
by parents) or else continuing their regular secular studies;
the religion teachers were not paid by the state but were
subject to the approval and supervision of the school superintendent.
Mrs. McCollum asked that the board of education put an end
to any kind of religious instruction in its public schools.
She lost in the Illinois courts, but the Supreme Court ruled
8 to 1 that the "released time" program violated the ban
on establishment.
The
school board argued, contrary to Everson, that the
no-establishment provision, properly interpreted, forbids
only government preference of one religion over another.
Writing for the Court as he had in Everson, Justice
Black rejected this argument as well as the school board's
request that the Court not follow or else overrule the part
of Everson that applied the no-establishment provision
to the states through the Fourteenth Amendment.
McCollum
produced three opinions in addition to Justice Black's;
all are presented here. Justice Felix Frankfurter, joined
by Justices Robert Jackson, Wiley Rutledge, and Harold Burton,
wrote to affirm what he called the "basic constitutional
principle of absolute separation [of church and state]."
Justice Jackson wrote a concurring opinion in which he nonetheless
expressed reservations about the litigious path the Court
seemed to be taking with its church-state jurisprudence.
Guided by "no law but our own prepossessions," he said,
the Court may prove incompetent to its new task of deciding
"where the secular ends and the sectarian begins."
Finally,
Justice Stanley Reed, in solitary dissent, became the first
justice to criticize the Court's exegesis of the history
of the no-establishment provision. Noting the Court's reliance
on Thomas Jefferson's phrase in an 1802 letter regarding
a "wall" separating church and state, Reed remarked that
"a rule of law should not be drawn from a figure of speech."
The
editorial responses to McCollum that are reprinted
here are from the (Washington) Evening Star and The Christian
Century.
Participating
in McCollum v. Board of Education, decided March
8, 1948, were Chief Justice Fred M. Vinson and Associate
Justices Hugo L. Black, Harold H. Burton, William O. Douglas,
Felix Frankfurter, Robert H. Jackson, Frank Murphy, Stanley
F. Reed, and Wiley B. Rutledge.
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