Wallace v. Jaffree, 472 U.S. 38 (1985), was a United States Supreme Court case deciding on the issue of silent school prayer.
Background
An Alabama law authorized teachers to set aside one minute at the start of each day for a moment for "meditation or voluntary prayer".
Ishmael Jaffree, an American citizen, was a resident of Mobile County, Alabama, and a parent of three students who attended school in the Mobile County Public School System; two of the three children were in the second grade and the third was in kindergarten. His youngest was being made fun of by peers because he refused to say the prayers.
On May 28, 1982, Jaffree brought a lawsuit naming the Mobile County School Board, various school officials, and the minor plaintiffs' three teachers as defendants. Jaffree sought a declaratory judgment and an injunction restraining the defendants from "maintaining or allowing the maintenance of regular religious prayer services or other forms of religious observances in the Mobile County Public Schools in violation of the First Amendment as made applicable to states by the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution".
Jaffree's complaint further alleged that two of his children had been subjected to various acts of religious indoctrination and that the defendant teachers had led their classes in saying certain prayers in unison on a daily basis; that as a result of not participating in the prayers his minor children had been exposed to ostracism from their peer group classmates; and that Jaffree had repeatedly but unsuccessfully requested that the prayers be stopped.
The original complaint mentioned no specific statutes, but the case later dealt with three laws for public schools in Alabama: the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Alabama ultimately allowed the practice, found in favor of the defendants and upheld all three laws. that the Alabama laws from 1981 and 1982 violated the US Constitution,