Everson v. Board of Education 1947
| Author | Daniel Brannen, Richard Hanes, Elizabeth Shaw |
| Pages | 112-117 |
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Petitioner: Arch R. Everson
Respondent: Board of Education of Ewing Township
Petitioner's Claim: That a New Jersey law allowing school boards to pay parents for transporting their children to schools, both public and religious, violated the constitutional separation of church and state.
Chief Lawyers for Petitioner: Edward R. Burke and E. Hilton Jackson
Chief Lawyer for Respondent: William H. Speer
Justices for the Court: Hugo Lafayette Black (writing for the Court), William O. Douglas, Frank Murphy, Stanley Forman Reed, Fred Moore Vinson
Justices Dissenting: Harold Burton, Felix Frankfurter, Robert H. Jackson, Wiley Blount Rutledge
Date of Decision: February 10, 1947
Decision: The New Jersey law was constitutional. It treated all children equally, and it served the general welfare of society by supporting education, not religion.
Significance: The Court's decision defined the meaning of the First Amendment separation of church and state.
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Thomas Jefferson first made the observation that church and state should be separated as if by a wall.
When the United States of America declared its independence in 1776, some of its founders wanted to escape the religious persecution that had been widespread in Europe. (Religious persecution is punishment for religious beliefs.) Most Europeans, including British citizens under the Church of England, were forced to be loyal to a state-approved religion. Loyalty meant paying taxes to support the official religion and refusing to follow a different religion. Penalties for violators included fines, jail, torture, and even death.
The United States's earliest leaders fought to keep the country free of these evils. In 1779 future president Thomas Jefferson drafted a Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom in Virginia. In it he wrote "that to compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation [spreading] of opinions which he disbelieves, is sinful and tyrannical."
Six years later, with Jefferson's bill still not enacted, the Virginia legislature tried to pass a law to raise taxes to support Virginia's official church. Future president James Madison expressed his opposition to the law by writing an essay called "Memorial and Remonstrance." In it Madison wrote about the persecution that happens under government-supported religions. Madison's essay helped to defeat the tax bill and to pass Jefferson's Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom in 1786.
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Three years later, as a member of the United States's first Congress under the new U.S. Constitution, Madison drafted the First Amendment for the Bill of Rights. (The Bill of Rights, adopted in 1791, contains the first...
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