Lewis Beale: Schempp family endured years of harassment

By Lewis Beale

Mornings at Abington Senior High School involved a numbing daily ritual: 10 verses of the bible were read over the school intercom, then students had to stand and recite the Lord’s Prayer.

Despite appearances, this was not happening at some small-town high school in the Bible Belt. Abington was a solidly middle class, very large and academically elite public high school in suburban Philadelphia, the kind of place where the quarterback and star running back on the football team in my senior year attended Princeton and Michigan, and went onto become a pediatric surgeon and lawyer, respectively. You get the idea.

Nevertheless, Abington was forced to conform to a Pennsylvania state law requiring the reading of bible verses at the beginning of every school day. This mandate did not sit well with a freethinking student named Ellery Schempp, who decided to bring the Quran to school and not only peruse it during the bible reading, but refuse to stand during the Lord’s Prayer. The school, confused about its response to this act of defiance, decided to excuse Ellery from the daily prayer for the rest of the year. But the following year, when he was a senior, the school mandated his participation.

That’s when the Schempp family decided to pursue the matter in the courts.

Sixty years ago, on June 17, 1963, in Abington School District v. Schempp, an 8-1 majority of the Supreme Court ruled that public schools cannot sponsor bible readings and recitations of the Lord’s Prayer under the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause. 

“In the relationship between man and religion,” said Justice Tom C. Clark, writing for the majority, “the state is firmly committed to a position of neutrality. [The bible-reading practices] are religious exercises, required by the states in violation of the command of the First Amendment that the government maintain strict neutrality, neither aiding nor opposing religion.”

I had a particular interest in this case, since I was a senior at Abington High School when the decision was announced, and had a few classes with Donna Schempp, the family’s daughter. (Ellery had graduated a few years previously, but because Donna and brother Roger were still in school, the case had moved forward). 

This led me, nearly 20 years later, to write a follow-up piece for the Philadelphia Inquirer, in which I tracked down members of the Schempp family to find out what it had been like to be part of such an important court case.

Some of what they told me was no surprise at all: Donna and Roger had been harassed at school and threatened with violence; animal waste had been mailed to the family; their sleep had been disturbed by filthy phone calls in the middle of the night; and busloads of school kids used to pass their home, shouting that they were going past “the Commie camp.”

Bigots harassing brave people standing up for their rights? What else is new? 

But my investigation back then uncovered a secret that seemed to have been buried for years, one which gave me a lesson in the totalitarian mindset of right-wing religious types.

It seems that our school principal, a man named W. Eugene Stull, turned out to be a supporter of the pro-creationism and pro-school prayer movements. He was so incensed by what the Schempps had done that he called Tufts University, where Ellery had applied for admission, called him a “troublemaker,” and put pressure on the university to reject him. When the university accepted him anyway (this “troublemaker” went onto earn a Ph.D. in chemistry), Stull called the admissions office and asked why his recommendation had been ignored.

Now, here’s the thing: 20 years after the court decision, the man who had answered that call was still at Tufts, and confirmed not only receiving it, but the content of the conversation. Yet, when I confronted Stull about this (he was retired at that point), he denied trying to interfere with Ellery’s admission, and claimed he had no knowledge of any call with a Tufts admissions officer. 

So, a fundamentalist bigot and liar was my high school principal. Maybe I should have known this all along, since Abington, despite its stellar academic reputation, was also a conservative, very WASPy school with a dab of anti-Semitism thrown into the mix. I was a Jewish kid with a smart-ass attitude, so the anti-Jewish thing rolled right off me. In fact, the only time I noticed it was when a classmate signed my yearbook “to the coolest Jew I know.” (Huh?!) But close friends attested to this not-so-subtle bigotry, and some of it came out at our 25th reunion, when a speaker noted what an intelligent class we were because we “elected a Jew as class treasurer.” Always wonderful to hear that old “Jews are good with money” stereotype.

So, religious intolerance was always stalking Abington’s hallways, either in the undercurrent of anti-Semitism, or in a particularly boring way — the daily bible reading, which basically no one paid attention to — which then became the Super Bowl of issues with the Schempp case. 

If nothing else, it helped me realize that organized religion is a crock, and I left it behind by the time I got to college. (I now identify as a Deist). 

But researching and writing the Schempp story also helped me get in touch with an ugly reality — the ways in which those fighting for religious freedom are ferociously resisted, despite the righteousness —and legality — of their cause. 

I especially felt for my classmate Donna Schempp (who had a graduate degree in social work and was working at a Montessori school at the time of our interview), who told me that all through high school she was a pretty scared kid, someone who just wanted to relate, but was ostracized and told she couldn’t be friends with certain kids. “Lots of kids saw me and my brother as weird, unacceptable,” she told me. “It was real traumatic.”

Yet, Donna’s trauma meant nothing to her tormentors. And, despite the fact that there is no law anywhere that says a student can’t pray or read the bible in school, the religious fascists keep trying to mandate prayer in the schools by introducing a constitutional amendment to that effect on numerous occasions. (President Reagan proposed one a month before my piece appeared.) They’ve had no luck so far, but like all fanatics, they keep on trying.

So, on this 60th anniversary of the Schempp decision, I think it’s important to acknowledge the bravery of the family: Donna, Roger, Ellery, mom Sid, dad Ed. They stood up for what is right, faced down the bigots, and won in the end. 

With the rise of Christian nationalism, it’s obvious the fight against the Religious Right is far from over, but there is no doubt that the Schempp clan belongs in the Religious Freedom Hall of Heroes.

FFRF Member Lewis Beale is a journalist who has worked for newspapers in Los Angeles, Detroit and New York.