Free Republic

Sidney Gerber Schempp, a plaintiff in a lawsuit that led to a landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling abolishing mandatory Bible-reading in the nation's public schools in 1963, has died in Hayward at age 91. Her children, who were also participants in the court case, remembered Mrs. Schempp on Thursday as not only an advocate of the separation of church and state, but a devotee of nature and peace as well. The court case began in 1956 when her oldest son, Ellery, a high school junior in a Philadelphia suburb, objected to the daily reading of Bible verses in his homeroom....