Madalyn Murray O'Hair

Madalyn Murray O'Hair ( Mays; April 13, 1919 – September 29, 1995) was an American activist and Holocaust denier supporting atheism and separation of church and state.

Madalyn Mays was born in the Beechview neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on April 13, 1919, the daughter of Lena Christina (née Scholle) and John Irwin Mays.

She had an older brother, John Irwin Jr. (known as "Irv").

Their father was of Scots-Irish ethnicity and their mother was of German ancestry.

At the age of four, Madalyn was baptized into her father's Presbyterian church; her mother was a Lutheran.

The family moved to Ohio, and in 1936, Mays graduated from Rossford High School in Rossford.

In 1941, Mays married John Henry Roths, a steelworker.

They separated when they both enlisted for World War II service, he in the United States Marine Corps, and she in the Women's Army Corps.

In April 1945, while posted to a cryptography position in Italy, she began a relationship with officer William J. Murray Jr., a married Roman Catholic.

He refused to divorce his wife.

Mays divorced Roths and adopted the name Madalyn Murray.

She gave birth to her son with officer Murray after returning to Ohio, and named the Boy William J. Murray III (nicknamed "Bill").

In 1949, Murray completed a bachelor's degree from Ashland University.

She earned a law degree from the South Texas College of Law, but did not pass the bar exam.

She moved with her son William To Baltimore, Maryland.

On November 16, 1954, she gave birth to her second son, Jon Garth Murray, fathered by her boyfriend Michael Fiorillo.

According to her son William, a Baptist minister, Madalyn was a socialist who unabashedly supported the Soviet Union.

William claimed that when he was still a child, Madalyn began hosting Socialist Labor Party meetings and asked him to attend so he could, as quoted from Madalyn, "learn the 'truth' about capitalism."

William also claimed that Madalyn twice sought to defect to the Soviet Union, applying first in 1959 through the Soviet Embassy in Washington, D.C., and again at the Soviet Embassy in Paris, travelling there for the express purpose in 1960; on both occasions, the Soviets denied her entry.

On their return from Paris, Murray and sons went to live with her mother, father, and brother, Irv, at their house in the Loch Raven, Baltimore neighborhood.

Soon after, Madalyn accompanied William To their neighbourhood school, Woodbourne Junior High, to re-enroll William for freshman classes.

Madalyn was unhappy to see students, after the recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance, engaging in prayer.

She instructed William To keep a log of all religious exercises and references to religion for the next two weeks, saying, "Well, if they'll keep us from going to Russia where there is some freedom, we'll just have to change America."

After the two weeks, and after her request that William be allowed to leave class during prayer times was denied by school authorities, she pulled him out of school and proceeded to file a lawsuit against the Baltimore Public School System, naming William as plaintiff.

She said that its practices of mandatory prayer and required reading of the Bible were unconstitutional.

The Supreme Court had prohibited officially sponsored prayer in schools in Engel v. Vitale (1962) on similar grounds.

In 1963, she founded American Atheists and served as its president until 1986, after which her son Jon Garth Murray succeeded her.

She created the first issues of American Atheist Magazine and identified as a "militant feminist".

O'Hair is best known for the Murray v. Curlett lawsuit, which challenged the policy of mandatory prayers and Bible reading in Baltimore public schools, in which she named her first son William J. Murray as plaintiff.

Consolidated with Abington School District v. Schempp (1963), it was heard by the United States Supreme Court, which ruled that officially sanctioned mandatory Bible-reading in American public schools was unconstitutional.

The US Supreme Court upheld her position by a ruling in 1963.

Because of hostility in Baltimore against her family related to this case, Murray left Maryland with her sons in 1963 and moved to Honolulu, Hawaii.

She had allegedly assaulted five Baltimore City Police Department officers who tried to retrieve her son William's girlfriend Susan from her house; she was a minor and had run away from home.

Susan gave birth to William's daughter, whom she named Robin.

Murray later adopted Robin.

After she founded the American Atheists and won Murray v. Curlett, she achieved attention to the extent that in 1964, Life magazine referred to her as "the most hated woman in America".

Through American Atheists, O'Hair filed numerous other suits on issues of separation of church and state.

In 1965, Murray married U.S. Marine Richard O'Hair, and changed her surname.

In 1995, O'Hair, her son Garth, and her granddaughter Robin disappeared from Austin, Texas.

Initial speculation suggested the trio had absconded with hundreds of thousands of dollars from American Atheists coffers; in fact, the trio had been murdered by their former associates, and the bodies were not found until 2001.