Students at Abington Senior High School, a public school in Pennsylvania, always started their day the same way. They read ten passages from the Bible — a state school requirement — followed up with recitation of the Lord’s Prayer. Parents who did not want their kids participating in either could excuse their child with a note, but that did not stop one of them from filing a lawsuit. Madalyn Murray, a self-identified atheist, brought suit in Baltimore in a related case later consolidated with the Pennsylvania one, Abington School District v. Schempp. Both the state court and the Maryland Court of Appeals rejected her case before the Supreme Court picked it up.

On this day, June 17, in 1963 the Supreme Court ruled that prayer in schools violated the Establishment clause of the constitution that separated out Church and State. That the students could be excluded from any of the activity in question was deemed by the court as insufficient from keeping the district from violating the constitution.

The decision, predictably, was met with no small measure of outrage. Just as controversial decisions today are often attempted reversed by the legislature, so Congress introduced more than 150 measures in the wake of the ruling to allow prayer in public schools. None succeeded. The only place on school grounds prayer is still acceptable is the football field.