Madalyn Murray O'Hair

Madalyn Murray O'Hair ( Mays; April 13, 1919 – September 29, 1995) was an American activist who supported atheism, separation of church and state, and feminism. 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 Supreme Court had prohibited officially sponsored prayer in schools in Engel v. Vitale (1962) on similar grounds. 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".

Early and personal life

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").

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 communist 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, who denied being a communist, actually held secret meetings in their basement with her Communist Party comrades. She 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 neighborhood school, Woodbourne Junior High School, 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 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. Although the couple separated, they were legally married until his death in 1978. The case was rejected by the U.S. Supreme Court for lack of jurisdiction. The challenge had limited effect.

O'Hair endorsed Jimmy Carter in the 1976 presidential election because of Carter's opposition to mandatory school prayer, his support for sex education in public schools, and his stance on ecological matters.

In a 1989 interview, O'Hair said "I told my kids I just want three words on my tombstone, if I have one. I'll probably be cremated. One is "woman." I'm very comfortable in that role. I've loved being a woman, I've loved being a mother, I've loved being a grandmother. I want three words: Woman, Atheist, Anarchist. That's me."

She also expressed her discontent with the women's liberation movement.

Holocaust denial

In the article "The Shoah: hope springs eternal" in the August 1989 issue of the American Atheist magazine, O'Hair downplayed the Holocaust:

In the same article, she claimed that "investigative and scholarly studies undertaken during the last fifty years", such as a book by Paul Rassinier, established that the total number of Jewish victims was between 1 and 1.5 million, adding, "[t]his is a far cry from an alleged 6,000,000", then elaborating on this point:

She concluded:

American Atheists

After settling in Austin, Texas, O'Hair founded American Atheists in 1963. It identifies as "a nationwide movement which defends the civil rights of non-believers, works for the separation of church and state and addresses issues of First Amendment public policy". She served as the group's first chief executive officer and president until 1986. She was the public voice and face of atheism in the United States during the 1960s and 1970s. Although her son Garth Murray succeeded her officially as president, she retained most of the power and decision making.

In a 1965 interview with Playboy, she described religion as "a crutch" and an "irrational reliance on superstitions and supernatural nonsense". In the same Playboy interview, O'Hair described numerous alleged incidents of harassment, intimidation, and death threats against her and her family. She read several letters she claimed to have received, including one that read (referring to the conversion of Paul the Apostle on the road to Damascus), "May Jesus, who you so vigorously deny, change you into a Paul." O'Hair told the interviewer, "Isn't that lovely? Christine Jorgensen had to go to Sweden for an operation, but me they'll fix with faith — painlessly and for nothing."

Arrested for disorderly conduct in Austin in 1977,

In 1988, O'Hair produced several issues of Truth Seeker under her masthead as part of an attempt to take over the publication,  but the courts ruled against her ownership.

Court cases

O'Hair filed numerous lawsuits in which she argued the separation of church and state had been breached.

Murray v. Curlett (1963) Challenged Bible reading and prayer recitation in Maryland public schools.
Murray v. United States (1964) To force the Federal Communications Commission to extend the Fairness Doctrine so that atheists could have equal time with religion on radio and television.
Murray v. Nixon (1970) Challenged weekly religious services in the White House.
O'Hair v. Paine (1971) Challenged open readings from the Bible by U.S. astronauts during their spaceflights, spurred by a reading from the book of Genesis by the crew of Apollo 8.
O'Hair v. Cooke (1977) Challenged the opening prayer at city council meetings in Austin, Texas.
O'Hair v. Blumenthal (1978) Challenged the inclusion of the phrase "In God We Trust" on U.S. currency.
O'Hair v. Hill (1978) To have removed from the Texas constitution a provision requiring a belief in God of persons holding offices of public trust.
O'Hair v. Andrus (1979) Challenged the use of National Park facilities for the Pope to hold a Roman Catholic mass on the Mall in Washington, D.C.
O'Hair v. Clements (1980) To have removed the nativity scene displayed in the rotunda of the capitol building in Austin, Texas.
Carter, et al. v Broadlawns Medical Center, et al. (1984–1987) Challenged the full-time employment of an unordained chaplain at a tax-funded county hospital, Broadlawns Medical Centre in Des Moines, Iowa.

Kidnapping and murder

In the 1990s, American Atheists staff consisted of O'Hair, her son Jon Garth Murray, and her granddaughter Robin Murray O'Hair, and a handful of support personnel. The trio lived in O'Hair's large home. The trio said in phone calls that they were on "business" in San Antonio, Texas.

Until September 27, American Atheists employees received several mobile phone calls from Robin and Jon, but neither explained why they had left or when they would return; employees reported that their voices sounded strained and disturbed. Bryce, William Murray, ABC Nightline reporter Valeri Williams and San Antonio Express-News reporter John MacCormack, amongst others, felt that little official effort went into the investigation because the authorities preferred to believe that the theft and disappearance was simply an internal American Atheists matter.

In 1999, nearly four years after the August 1995 disappearances, continued prodding and investigative leads from the various reporters When Waters received a lenient sentence, O'Hair published an article in the American Atheists newsletter in which she exposed the theft of the moneyalong with his previous crimes. A few days after O'Hair and her son and granddaughter were killed, Waters and Karr killed Fry. His body was found on a riverbed in rural Dallas County in October 1995, but his head and hands were missing; as a result, his remains were not identified for three and a half years,

Waters was arrested and prosecuted; in a January 2001 plea agreement solely on the charge of conspiracy, he agreed to lead authorities to the site where the dismembered bodies of the O'Hairs had been burned and buried. He was sentenced to serve 20 years in federal prison, which he had requested, because he did not want to serve time for his earlier theft conviction in Texas state prison. He did not go on trial for the kidnapping and murder of the three members of the O'Hair family. He was also ordered to pay back a total of $543,665 to American Atheists and the estates of Madalyn Murray O'Hair, Jon Garth Murray, and Robin Murray O'Hair. It is unlikely that any part of these debts were ever paid, because Waters was not able to earn any money while he was in prison. Waters died of lung cancer on January 27, 2003, at the Federal Medical Center in Butner, North Carolina. The head and hands of Danny Fry were also found at the site.

In 1995, Waters and his girlfriend had put the gold coins, which he and his accomplices had extorted from the O'Hairs, in an unsecured storage locker which had been rented by the girlfriend. It only had a cheap padlock. Non-religious students had been expected to participate in such activities, and state-level policies varied.

O'Hair's embrace of conspiracy theories led later atheists to distance themselves from her.

In 2012, a memorial brick for Murray, her son Jon, and her granddaughter Robin was placed at Lou Neff Point in Zilker Park in Austin, Texas.

thumb|The side of the [[American Atheists granite bench and plinth at the Bradford County Courthouse, Florida, showing a quote by O'Hair]]

In 2013, the first atheist monument to be erected on American government property was unveiled at the Bradford County Courthouse in Florida, where other residents had installed a monument to religious ideals (in this case, a replica of the Ten Commandments). It is a 1,500-pound granite bench and plinth inscribed with quotes by O'Hair, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin.

O'Hair was incorporated into a popular urban legend stemming from an erroneous characterization of RM-2493, a proposal made to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in 1974. The purpose of the proposal was to prevent organizations from making religious broadcasts on stations licensed for educational use. False rumors spread that O'Hair was a proponent of RM-2493, and that its intent was to ban the broadcast of religious services, and the reading of the Bible over the airwaves. The FCC's denial of RM-2493 in 1975, and O'Hair's later disappearance and murder, did little to stem the spread of the legend, which still claimed years later that O'Hair was pushing an active FCC proposal. Subsequent iterations of the rumor included allegations that O'Hair was campaigning to remove Christmas programs and songs from public schools and "office buildings". Other variations mentioned specific religious leaders who were supposedly being targeted for removal from the airwaves, or stated that the television series Touched by an Angel was threatened with cancellation because of the proposal. Evangelical Christian leader James Dobson became falsely associated with the legend as well, purportedly leading opposition to the FCC petition. As of 2015, the FCC was still receiving dozens of correspondences relating to O'Hair every month.

Popular culture

In 1981, the country music group The Statler Brothers released the song "Don't Wait on Me", which humorously compiles a list of events that are highly unlikely to ever happen, one of these being "when they ordain Madeline O'Hair and she becomes a priest", a reference to her affinity for atheism.

The December 2002 episode "Without a Prayer", of the series Forensic Files, deals with the disappearance and deaths of O'Hair, her son and her granddaughter.

A 2017 Netflix movie, The Most Hated Woman in America, is a loose dramatization of O'Hair's life. It focuses on the abductions and killings of O'Hair and two family members in 1995.

Books by or about Murray O'Hair

References

External links

FBI Records: The Vault - Madalyn Murray O'Hair at fbi.gov
The Murder of Madalyn Murray O'Hair: America's Most Hated Woman Crime Magazine
Interview with Madalyn Murray O'Hair at Texas Archive of the Moving Image