Ellery Schempp | |
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 Ellery Schempp in 2012 | |
| Born | August 5, 1940 Philadelphia, PA |
Ellery Schempp (born Ellory Schempp, August 5, 1940) is an American physicist [1] and the primary student involved in the landmark 1963 United States Supreme Court decision of Abington School District v. Schempp [2] which declared that required public school sanctioned Bible readings were unconstitutional.
Schempp was born in Philadelphia and grew up in the Roslyn community of Abington Township. He graduated from Abington High School in 1958, and attended Tufts University where he earned bachelor degrees in physics and geology. [1] In 1967, Schempp received his Ph.D. in physics from Brown University. [3]
In 1977, Schempp was part of the Pittsburgh Explorer’s Group Nanga Parbat Expedition which was to be the first American group to reach the peak of Nanga Parbat in Pakistan.
Schempp, who is retired, currently resides in Boston, Massachusetts. [4]
Stephen D. Solomon, a professor at New York University, has written a book about Schempp and the Supreme Court case entitled Ellery’s Protest: How One Young Man Defied Tradition and Sparked the Battle over School Prayer. [5]
On November 26, 1956, Schempp staged a protest against the school requiring that each student read 10 Bible passages and the Lord's Prayer each day during homeroom. That day he brought a copy of the Qur'an and read from it; [1] [6] for this he was sent to the principal's office. With the help of his father, Edward Schempp, and the American Civil Liberties Union, they sued the Abington School district over their policy of mandatory Bible readings. [3]
To maintain standing in the case, Schempp (and later his younger siblings Roger and Donna) continued to fight this policy in the courts over several years. The Schempps were Unitarian Universalists, a theologically liberal religious community. The case was eventually decided in Schempps's favor by the Supreme Court in 1963, five years after he had graduated from high school. [2] The precedent that this decision established, that the public school does not have the right to sponsor religious exercises and then pressure students to take part in them has appeared time and time again in every church-state case focusing on religion in public schools. [7]
Schempp considers himself to be an atheist, [3] but supports the Unitarian Universalist organizations and is a strong supporter of the ACLU and of the separation of church and state. He is a popular speaker at Unitarian Universalist and secular humanist meetings, where he speaks about his landmark protest as well as the current state of democracy, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. As of 2011, he was still active in the Bedford Unitarian Universalist church near his home. [3]
Schempp is a member of the American Humanist Association, the Freedom from Religion Foundation, and Americans United for the Separation of Church and State. In 1996, he received the Religious Liberty Award from Americans United. He is on the Advisory Board of the Secular Student Alliance [8] and the Secular Coalition for America. [9] He has traveled throughout the country talking about his experiences. [10] [11]
In 2002, Schempp was elected to Abington Senior High School's hall of fame for his accomplishments in physics. In his acceptance speech, he said that "When I left Abington in 1958, it wasn’t clear that Abington ever wanted to see me again". The award did include the notation “Initiated school prayer suit against Abington which was eventually decided by U.S. Supreme Court in 1963.” [1] [12]
Schempp's doctoral thesis was entitled Nuclear Quadrupole Resonance in Nitrogen Heterocycles. This work was the precursor to the development of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) on which he continued to work for a substantial portion of his career. [1]
Unitarian Universalism is a liberal religious movement characterized by a "free and responsible search for truth and meaning". Unitarian Universalists assert no creed, but instead are unified by their shared search for spiritual growth. Unitarian Universalists do not have an official, unified corpus of sacred texts but rather draw inspiration and guidance from the six sources: personal experience, prophetic utterances, world religions, Jewish and Christian teachings, humanist teachings, and spiritual teachings. Unitarian Universalist congregations include many atheists, agnostics, deists, and theists; there are churches, fellowships, congregations, and societies around the world.
Abington School District v. Schempp, 374 U.S. 203 (1963), was a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court decided 8–1 in favor of the respondent, Edward Schempp, on behalf of his son Ellery Schempp, and declared that school-sponsored Bible reading and the recitation of the Lord's Prayer in public schools in the United States was unconstitutional.
Engel v. Vitale, 370 U.S. 421 (1962), was a landmark United States Supreme Court case in which the Court ruled that it is unconstitutional for state officials to compose an official school prayer and encourage its recitation in public schools, due to violation of the First Amendment. The ruling has been the subject of intense debate.
American Atheists is a non-profit organization in the United States dedicated to defending the civil liberties of atheists and advocating complete separation of church and state. It provides speakers for colleges, universities, clubs, and the news media. It also publishes books and American Atheist Magazine.
Lee v. Weisman, 505 U.S. 577 (1992), was a United States Supreme Court decision regarding school prayer. It was the first major school prayer case decided by the Rehnquist Court. It held that schools may not sponsor clerics to conduct even non-denominational prayer. The Court followed a broad interpretation of the Establishment Clause that had been standard for decades at the nation's highest court, a reaffirmation of the principles of such landmark cases as Engel v. Vitale and Abington School District v. Schempp.
In United States law, the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, together with that Amendment's Free Exercise Clause, form the constitutional right of freedom of religion. The relevant constitutional text is:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion...
The American Unitarian Association (AUA) was a religious denomination in the United States and Canada, formed by associated Unitarian congregations in 1825. In 1961, it consolidated with the Universalist Church of America to form the Unitarian Universalist Association.
Abington Senior High School is a four-year co-educational high school in Abington, Pennsylvania, United States. A part of the Abington School District, the school was a two-year high school known as Abington South Campus from September 1964 until June 1983. In September 1983, Abington South Campus again became a three-year high school and eventually changed its name back to Abington Senior High. The 2017-2018 enrollment was 1,808. The interim principal is Ms. Susan McCarthy. Abington students are leaders in PSSA scores in the state of Pennsylvania and have won technology-oriented awards from Dell and Microsoft. The school is noted for being involved in the landmark supreme court case decision: Abington School District v. Schempp.
The Rev. William G. Sinkford is a Unitarian Universalist minister who served as the seventh president of the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations (UUA), from 2001 to 2009. His installation as UUA president made him the first African American to lead that organization, or any traditionally white religious denomination in the United States.
Abington School District is a medium-sized, suburban, public school district that serves the borough of Rockledge and Abington Township in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania. The district operates one high school, one middle school, and seven elementary schools.
The Unitarian Universalist Church of Medford and The Osgood House are a historic Unitarian Universalist church building and parsonage house at 141 and 147 High Street in Medford, Massachusetts.
The Crane Theological School was a Universalist seminary at Tufts University founded in 1869 as the Tufts College Divinity School and closed in 1968. It was one of three Universalist seminaries founded in America during the nineteenth century, along with the Theological School of St. Lawrence University and the Ryder Divinity School at Lombard College. During its history, it granted 281 Bachelor of Divinity degrees, 152 Bachelor of Sacred Theology degrees, and two Masters of Religious Education, for a total of 435 degrees.
The School Prayer Amendment is a proposed amendment to the United States Constitution intended by its proponents to protect the right of the students if they wish, to voluntarily pray in schools, although opponents argue it allows for government-sponsored prayer.
Schempp may refer to:
Cameron Village is a neighborhood in the North District of Baltimore, located between the neighborhoods of Mid-Govans and Woodbourne Heights. Vaguely bell-shaped, its boundaries are marked by Bradhurst Road and E. Belvedere Avenue (north), Woodbourne Avenue (south), Lothian Road (west) and Northwood Drive (east).
School prayer in the United States if organized by the school is largely banned from public elementary, middle and high schools by a series of Supreme Court decisions since 1962. Students may pray privately, and join religious clubs in after-school hours. Public schools are those operated by government agencies, such as local school districts. They are banned from conducting religious observances such as prayer. Private and parochial schools are not covered by these rulings, nor are colleges and universities. Elementary and secondary schools are covered because students are required to attend, and are considered more at risk from official pressure than are older students and adults. The Constitutional basis for this prohibition is the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, which requires that:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof ...
The secular movement refers to a social and political trend in the United States, beginning in the early years of the 20th century, with the founding of the American Association for the Advancement of Atheism in 1925 and the American Humanist Association in 1941, in which atheists, agnostics, secular humanists, freethinkers, and other nonreligious and nontheistic Americans have grown in both numbers and visibility. There has been a sharp increase in the number of Americans who identify as religiously unaffiliated, from under 10 percent in the 1990s to 20 percent in 2013. The trend is especially pronounced among young people, with about one in three Americans younger than 30 identifying as religiously unaffiliated, a figure that has nearly tripled since the 1990s.
Henry Washington Sawyer III was an American lawyer, civil rights activist and politician. Born in Philadelphia, he served in the U.S. Navy in World War II, afterwards returning to the University of Pennsylvania Law School. Sawyer worked as a corporate lawyer but is best known for his advocacy of civil liberties, especially in First Amendment cases. In Abington School District v. Schempp and Lemon v. Kurtzman, he successfully argued cases on behalf of the American Civil Liberties Union before the Supreme Court of the United States that became the basis for all modern Establishment Clause jurisprudence. Sawyer also pursued civil rights causes in Philadelphia and in the South during the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Originally a Republican, he was elected as a Democrat to serve a four-year term on the Philadelphia City Council, where he worked for civil service reform and to increase the amount of public art in the city.
Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, 597 U.S. ___ (2022), is a landmark decision by the United States Supreme Court in which the Court held, 6–3, that the government, while following the Establishment Clause, may not suppress an individual from engaging in personal religious observance, as doing so would violate the Free Speech and Free Exercise Clauses of the First Amendment.
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