Vashti McCollum Dies

Vashti McCollum, whose lawsuit to stop religious instruction on school property led to a landmark ruling by the United States Supreme Court in 1948 to protect the separation of church and state in education, died Sunday in Champaign, Ill. She was 93. Her death was confirmed by her son James, whose refusal as a fifth grader to attend voluntary religious instruction led to the lawsuit.
Mrs. McCollum, who called herself an atheist in Illinois court proceedings but later preferred the word ''humanist,'' said her son was ostracized and embarrassed by his schoolmates because she refused to let him attend the religion classes at his public school in Champaign. The classes for Protestants were on school premises; Jews and Roman Catholics went to religious buildings elsewhere.
She also contended that the classes were a misuse and waste of taxpayers' money, discriminated against minority faiths and were an unconstitutional merger of church and state.
After losing in two Illinois courts, Mrs. McCollum won an 8-to-1 decision by the Supreme Court. Justice Hugo L. Black, who wrote the majority opinion, said the practice in Champaign was ''beyond all question'' using tax-established and tax-supported schools ''to aid religious groups to spread their faith,'' and, he added, ''It falls squarely under the ban of the First Amendment.''
A critical issue in the case 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.
''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,'' Justice Black wrote.
The case was also important because it extended the First Amendment's protections to the states by using the due process clause of the much later 14th Amendment as justification. As such, all other cases that test Jefferson's wall of ''separation of church and state'' -- including school prayer, aid to parochial schools and sectarian religious displays on public property -- descend from this case.
The language used in comments immediately after the Supreme Court's ruling would percolate in debates for decades. The Catholic bishops, for example, accused the court of making a religion of secularism.
In 1952, the Supreme Court revisited the issue of religious instruction in Zorach v. Clauson. The 6-to-3 ruling in that case held that a New York program allowing religious education during the school day was permissible because it did not use public school facilities or public money.
Vashti Ruth Cromwell was born in Lyons, N.Y., on Nov. 6, 1912, and grew up in Rochester. She was named for the queen of the Persian King Xerxes depicted in Esther 1 in the Bible who refuses to obey her husband's order and is divorced for her spunk.
Her father, Arthur G. Cromwell, was an architect who read the works of atheists like Spinoza and Thomas Paine, then read seven versions of the Bible. After letting the conflicting ideas germinate for years, he had become a vocal atheist by the time his two daughters were in college, James McCollum said.
Mr. Cromwell was president of the Rochester Society of Free Thinkers and had persuaded the state education commissioner to end religious instruction in the schools of the one county in which it was permitted before his daughter filed suit to accomplish the same thing.
Vashti Cromwell received a scholarship to Cornell, but the money ran out during the Depression and she transferred to the University of Illinois, where she majored in political science and took courses at the law school. At the university, she met John Paschal McCollum, a professor of vegetable crops in the horticultural department, and they married in 1933.
After her children were older, Mrs. McCollum earned a master's degree in mass communications at the university.
She is survived by her sons James, of Emerson, Ark., Dannel, of Champaign, and Errol, of Moline, Ill.; her sister, Helen Curtis, who lives in a Rochester suburb; six grandchildren; and six great-grandchildren.
James McCollum, the oldest son, said that he at first had wanted to attend the religion classes, but that his mother objected. After a few months, he was allowed to go, but found the classes childish and ''silly.'' The next year, he said, he told his parents he did not wish to attend.
His mother talked with the school system's superintendent, but he said there was nothing he could do. She was careful to say that she was making no criticism of religion, The New York Daily News reported in 1945.
She then sued with the help of a local Unitarian minister and financial support from a group of Jewish businessmen in Chicago. Her opponents, in addition to the City of Champaign, were church federations.
A dramatic moment during the initial trial of the case came when Mrs. McCollum's father said he did not believe in God, and a gasp went up from the crowd. Later, James McCollum said the same thing. Both ''affirmed'' that they would tell the truth instead of swearing by God. Mrs. McCollum called herself ''a rationalist or an atheist.''
Time magazine observed that the trial shared ''features that made the Scopes 'monkey trial' a sideshow'' of the 1920's.
In the three-year legal battle, Mrs. McCollum received physical threats and was fired from her job as a dance instructor at the university. At Halloween, a mob of trick-or-treaters pelted the McCollum family with rotten tomatoes and cabbages. The family cat was lynched.
Mrs. McCollum wrote a book on the case, ''One Woman's Fight,'' became a world traveler and served two terms as president of the American Humanist Association.
''We don't bother ourselves with the question of whether there is or isn't a God,'' she said in a speech in 1948.
Correction: August 30, 2006, Wednesday An obituary on Saturday about Vashti McCollum, who successfully pursued the Supreme Court case that banned religious education in public schools, incorrectly described the religious beliefs of Thomas Paine, whose writings influenced the thinking of her father. Although Paine was frequently described as an atheist by his critics, he was actually a deist.