Ishmael Jaffree
From Philosopedia
Jaffree, Ishmael (28 March 1944 - )
Jaffree is an African American attorney and church-state litigant who went before the U.S. Supreme Court. In “The Quest for Humanist Values” in Free Inquiry (Spring, 1990), he describes a 1982 complaint he filed to keep prayer and other religious activities out of the public schools of Mobile, Alabama.
“As a lawyer and an agnostic who strongly believes in the separation of church and state,” he wrote, “I was seeking to maintain the integrity of the Constitution and to keep public officials from making decisions about my children’s spiritual upbringing.”
But what he thought was a simple enough request resulted in a 1983 U.S. District Court ruling against him, and the case set off a national controversy about the nature of secular humanism and the separation of church and state. Fellow blacks, he found, were hostile that he was not being a “good Christian.”
He was threatened, slandered, vilified by mail and phone, and his children were ostracized. But when the Supreme Court ruled in his favor, the negative criticism subsided. Still, he writes, “We African Americans are among the most repressed people, and religion helps us to cope with the everyday struggles of living. . . . I wish that people would be more open to the scientific method of inquiry and not so given to mysticism.”
Jaffree is an Advisory Board Member of African Americans for Humanism. In 1998 he was named Freethinker of the Year by the Freedom From Religion Foundation. In his acceptance speech, he said,
- I brought the case because I wanted to encourage toleration among my children. I certainly did not want teachers who have control over my children for at least eight hours over the day to . . . program them into any religious philosophy.
