Ishmael Jaffree, Who Won Case Rejecting School Prayer, Is Dead at 80

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Ishmael Jaffree, Who Won Case Rejecting School Prayer, Is Dead at 80

An Alabama parent, he objected to prayer in his children’s classrooms. The Supreme Court ruled for him, a high-water mark in the push for the strict separation of church and state.


Ishmael Jaffree outside the U.S. Supreme Court in 1984. The next year, the court ruled in his favor in his challenge to Alabama laws that had made it easier to bring prayer into the classroom. Bettmann Archive/Getty Images

By Clay Risen
Published April 14, 2026
Updated April 15, 2026, 12:15 a.m. ET

One afternoon in 1981, Ishmael Jaffree’s son came home from kindergarten and asked about God. ... Mr. Jaffree, a lawyer in Mobile, Ala., was agnostic, and he recoiled when his son and his two older children, both second graders, told him that their teachers had been leading their classes in prayer. The Supreme Court had banned mandatory prayer in public schools in 1962, but a series of recent laws in Alabama had made it easier to bring religion into the classroom.

Mr. Jaffree complained to the teachers, then the principal, and then the district superintendent. His objection was about more than principle: When his kindergartner son refused to pray along, his classmates bullied him. ... After Mr. Jaffrey failed to get any answers, he filed a federal lawsuit in 1982, charging that the Alabama laws violated the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause.

In 1985, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in his favor, restricting states from allowing anything more than a belief-neutral “moment of silence” in classrooms. ... “Just as the right to speak and the right to refrain from speaking are complementary components of a broader concept of individual freedom of mind,” Justice John Paul Stevens wrote for the majority, “so also the individual’s freedom to choose his own creed is the counterpart of his right to refrain from accepting the creed established by the majority.”

The decision in the case, Wallace v. Jaffree, represented a high-water mark in the court’s defense of a strict separation between church and state. It made Mr. Jaffree a hero among civil libertarians, atheists and humanists. A few months after the court’s opinion was handed down, the Freedom From Religion Foundation gave him its inaugural Freethinker of the Year award. ... Mr. Jaffree died on July 30, 2024, in Mobile. He was 80. His death, which was not widely reported at the time, was brought to the attention of The New York Times last week by the Freedom From Religion Foundation.

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Mr. Jaffree, left, and his attorney, Ronnie Williams, in 1982, after he had filed his suit charging that the Alabama laws violated the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause. UPI

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Clay Risen is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk.

A version of this article appears in print on April 15, 2026, Section B, Page 11 of the New York edition with the headline: Ishmael Jaffree, 80; Won Rejection of School Prayer. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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1. Thank you, Mr. Jaffree, for your service to the cause of freedom!

We need more warriors like you!

Rest in Peace, sir!