Former AHA President Vashti McCollum Dies, But Ideals Live On
August 24, 2006
For Immediate Release
Contact: Roy Speckhardt, (202) 238-9088
rspeckhardt@americanhumanist.org
- www.americanhumanist.org
“…We must seize every opportunity to present the cause of freedom.”
Vashti McCollum, 'One Woman’s Fight', 1951
(Washington, D.C.) Former American Humanist Association
President and Humanist activist Vashti McCollum died Sunday evening in
Champaign, Illinois. She was 93 years old.
“A woman of extraordinary strength and courage, Vashti McCollum stood up for
the separation of church and state at a time when social hostility against
atheism ran deep and the personal toll was very high. Few of us would have
been able to withstand the opposition that she did. Her contributions to the
AHA and the Humanist movement are invaluable; her death is a tremendous loss
and she will be greatly missed,” commented Roy Speckhardt, executive
director of the American Humanist Association.
Vashti McCollum, against considerable odds, waged a legal battle that pitted
herself against an entire community and challenged a public school's
policies. The battle began in the mid 1940's when McCollum’s oldest son,
Jim, was ostracized by his peers and rebuked by a teacher for refusing to
enroll in a religious education class that was offered by his Champaign
public school. After McCollum’s appeals to the school’s administration to
end the program went unanswered, she filed a writ of mandamus in the
Champaign County Circuit Court, despite facing social disgrace and the
termination of her employment. The case moved from the Circuit Court to the
Illinois Supreme Court, both times the courts ruling in favor of the school
program. The case was appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled 8 to 1
on March 9, 1948 that the program was unconstitutional and that the
Establishment Clause of the First Amendment must be applied to the states by
virtue of the Due Process Clause in the Fourteenth Amendment. McCollum v.
Board of Education was a legal landmark in the separation of church and
state and has since served as a foundation for numerous other church-state
rulings by the Supreme Court and lower courts.
McCollum continued on through her life to fight for religious freedom and
Humanism. She was elected to the American Humanist Association board of
directors in 1952 and served as president of the AHA from 1962 to 1965. She
has won numerous awards and recognitions, including the prestigious John
Haynes Holmes Award (now the Holmes-Weatherly Award) from the Unitarian
Fellowship for Social Justice and the AHA Distinguished Service Award in
1991. She also wrote eloquently of her 1945 legal battle and the ensuing
community assaults and indignities she and her family endured in One Woman’s
Fight (Beacon Press, 1951).
Vashti McCollum was born in Lyons, New York on the 6th of November, 1912.
She is survived by her three sons, Jim, Dan, and Errol. Jim McCollum, an
active member of the AHA, was recently awarded the 2005 Religious Liberty
Award.
