Madalyn Murray began her life as Madalyn Mays. She was born on 13 April 1919, the younger of two children. Their father John was one of 13, and so was their mother Lena. John and Lena had married young and fled to Pittsburgh in an attempt to escape the desperate poverty of Appalachia. A few months into her second pregnancy, Lena tried to abort her child. The first birth had been so painful she did not want to go through that experience again. She took hot baths, ingested herbal abortifacients, jumped out of a second-floor window, threw herself down the stairs. The foetus stayed put and Madalyn emerged at full term. Madalyn was born ‘in the caul’, which in medieval times was taken as a sign of good fortune or of a great destiny. Caul births are rare – a one in 80,000 event. The caul usually covers just part of the skull and face (the word is a variant of cowl); rarer are cauls that cover the whole body as Madalyn’s did. Rarer still, her caul was not translucent but dark. Lena, a psychic, must have wondered at the omen. It had once been the custom to present the caul to the mother as a keepsake, a tradition surely no longer common in Lena’s day; but whether or not he knew that he was keeping a tradition alive, the doctor did offer the caul to Lena, and she kept it for many years.
John’s construction business thrived for a time, well enough anyway that he could build his family a small brick house, but as the Depression deepened the business collapsed, and John turned to bootlegging. His drinking establishment also served as a brothel. When Franklin Roosevelt repealed the Prohibition laws, John lost his way of making a living yet again. In the years to come he would often say that Roosevelt had ruined his life. Madalyn remembered that as a girl she was encouraged to lie on the back seat of the truck, the hooch hidden underneath, pretending to be asleep.
In her early teens Madalyn had been religious. She claimed somewhat improbably that she had read the Bible voraciously over a weekend, from cover to cover. One day, as she was walking to her grandparents, she was blinded by the sun reflected off snow. She had been thinking irreligious thoughts at the time and wondered if God was punishing her. And then she wondered what kind of God would punish a young girl. This was the story she told in later life of her conversion, curiously paralleling that of Saul on the road to Damascus, but in reverse.
Madalyn was a student at the University of Toledo for a while after the family moved to Ohio, and then at the University of Pittsburgh when the family moved briefly back to Pittsburgh. She worked as a secretary part-time in order to pay the fees.
In 1941, at the age of 22, she met and fell in love with John Henry Roths, a steel worker. They ran off to Maryland together and got married. Very soon after they went their separate ways, both joining the military. Pearl Harbor had been attacked a few months earlier. Roths joined the marines and Madalyn the Women’s Army Corps (WAC). Roths was posted to the South Pacific, and Madalyn to a number of placings in Europe and North Africa. She claimed she worked as a cryptographer on Eisenhower’s staff in Rome and had high security clearance. Madalyn enjoyed the camaraderie of the army, and wanted society to be like that. She embraced socialism as the means. She was made a Lieutenant. She fell in love with William J. Murray Jr, a bomber pilot in the Eighth Army Air Corps, and became pregnant in September 1945. She had by this time divorced Roths. Murray came from a wealthy Long Island Catholic family and was already married. Murray ignored Madalyn’s pleas that he should divorce his wife and marry her. He refused, even, to admit that he was the father of her child. And then he disappeared. Madalyn railed at and cursed God, challenging Him during a storm to strike her down with a lightning bolt. That He did not was further proof that He did not exist.
She gave birth to a boy on 26 May 1946. She named him William Joseph Murray III and changed her own surname to Murray, then sued the father for paternity. It was the first of many legal actions she would file during her lifetime. She had stumbled on her modus operandi. The jury laughed when Madalyn presented a pair of Murray’s pants as evidence of their intimacy, but she won the case and Murray was ordered to pay $15 a week until Bill was 18.
After the war Madalyn used her veteran status to take out a loan and buy a house. She was back once more in Ohio. The whole family moved in, including her brother Irv and her mother and father. She went back to college, her choice limited to what was closest at hand, which was Ashland, an evangelical university. As a veteran her fees were paid for, but she was looking after the entire family and took a job at the Akron Rubber Company. Her brother Irv and her father John never had a full-time job the rest of their lives. In 1948 at the age of 29 she received a degree in history, ranked second in her class of 43. For several years she studied law, taking night classes at a law school run by the YMCA. She left in 1952 with another degree but failed her Bar exams. She got a job at Glenn L. Martin Company, the aircraft company that would later manufacture both the Vanguard and Titan rockets. Madalyn loved books and reading, but suburban life got her down. The satirical Malvina Reynolds song ‘Little Boxes’ didn’t come out until 1962 but Madalyn already characterized suburban life as ‘identical houses with identical people in them’. She wanted her life to mean something. She was intelligent and restless. She moved from job to job, falling out with her bosses. She said they could not cope with her wit and intelligence.
Madalyn was never very motherly. Bill said it wasn’t until he was seven years old that he realized that Madalyn actually was his mother. He had taken to calling her by her first name. It was only when she told him to stop that the penny dropped. She may not have been maternal in a conventional way, but she was ambitious for her son. That was the year she gave him a microscope for his birthday. At the age of nine he was attending political meetings at home.
In 1953, Madalyn met a local Italian man and was pregnant again sometime in 1954. It led to a row at home that Bill remembered particularly, even though fights were a common occurrence. They were not a typical family, he said: ‘We argued about the value of the American way, whether or not the workers should revolt, and why the Pope, Christians, and Jews – anybody who believed in God – were morons.’ Everyone shouted and swore at each other all the time. There were physical fights too. Things were thrown across the room, blows were struck. But on the night Madalyn told her father about her pregnancy things escalated. Madalyn got hold of a kitchen knife, ran across the room with it, and managed to slash both her brother Irv and her father. She then ran out of the room cursing her father: ‘I’ll get you yet. I’ll walk over your grave.’ ‘It was just another day,’ Bill Murray wrote in his autobiography, ‘in my life without God.’ Bill said the only time there was peace at home was when his mother was depressed, which was, however, fairly often.
Jon Garth Murray was born in November 1954. Madalyn was as distant with Garth as she had been with Bill. She didn’t touch him, and he was left for hours banging his head against the headboard of his crib for attention that never came. Around the time of his birth Madalyn began to talk about moving the family – from Baltimore, where they were they were now living – to Russia. After the launch of Sputnik in 1957 Madalyn wrote in her diary: ‘I am aglow with joy . . . and have enough pride in it that one would think they were my own accomplishments.’ Later, Madalyn encouraged Bill to clip out every mention of Gagarin. A signed framed photograph of the cosmonaut hung on their wall. Not that Bill needed much persuading: ‘I had begun to indulge in fantasies about flying machines,’ he wrote. ‘The dream of flight, of mighty rockets propelling me into space toward far-off worlds, thrilled me. I dreamed of the day I would climb aboard one of those sleek ships and find my hands at the controls. I regularly read one or two science-fiction books each week’. Madalyn had an idea that she could use Bill’s massive scrapbook – larger than anything, Bill said, Gagarin’s own mother might have compiled – to impress officials at the Soviet Embassy. In the meantime, she encouraged Bill to use his school reports to write approvingly of the Soviet Union whenever the opportunity presented itself. In one report his mother persuaded him to write glowingly of holidays on the Caspian Sea, so much better than anything that America had to offer; in another, why the Soviet government and economic system were so effective. In the playground Bill was bullied for being a Commie traitor. At home Madalyn subscribed to USSR magazine, produced in the likeness of Life magazine. It was printed in Virginia to a quality far superior than anything that came out in the USSR at the time.
Madalyn managed to get a grant from the National Institute of Heath to study at Howard’s University Graduate School of Social Work. That put her plan to defect on hold for a while. But her thesis was rejected, and she inevitably fell out with her professors. At home she continued to study and read, feeding her particular love of history.
She had begun to despair of Bill’s poor performance at school: ‘He was failing utterly,’ she wrote in her diary. ‘He cannot learn, he cannot read. He cannot translate thought into words . . . I’ve engaged in an ugly brutal battle with the school because of it, but . . . I grieve almost as if for a lost cause.’ She would criticize his spelling, and then say to him: ‘Men are stupid. No matter what the subject, I’ve always picked it up with ease. But not you, or your father, or your uncle, or your grandfather. There’s not a quick-witted man in the world.’ Bill said that what was really holding him back was that he was the only boy at school still wearing short trousers. Madalyn had transferred the ambitions she had held for Bill to Garth. Before Garth was three years old, she wrote in her diary that she had ‘a mystic assurance . . . Garth will have as much effect on the world as Jesus Christ, Freud or Marx have had on the total Western historical development’.
Even when she was at her most despairing, Madalyn retained her ability to self-aggrandize. If her life sucked, no life had ever sucked quite like hers. ‘Here I am on the edge of 40,’ she confided to her diary in 1959, ‘with no references . . . with all this social work background . . . with two kids and no husband . . . has anyone anywhere been such a glorious failure.’ And yet her depressions were real enough and she contemplated suicide a number of times. She was restless and needed to find an outlet for her energy and intelligence. Perhaps in Russia she would be appreciated. She wrote to the Soviet Embassy in Washington expressing her desire to emigrate. When the staff at the embassy proved to be less than helpful, she took matters into her own hands. She had an idea that if she got the family to France it would offer an easier way into the USSR. She and the boys departed America on 24 August 1960 on the Queen Elizabeth. She left a letter officially renouncing her citizenship with her mother, telling her to mail it after they were safely out of the country. Lena consulted her tarot cards and saw that the family would be back. She decided to ignore her daughter’s instructions. It was probably around this time that the FBI began to take an interest in Madalyn. Years later, when she got hold of her files through the Freedom of Information Act, she said that the first of several files was a bundle of some 650 pages.
Needless to say, getting the USSR to accept them as citizens was no more easily accomplished through the Soviet agencies in France than it had been in America. Bill said they had as much trouble getting into the USSR as most people had trying to get out. After about a year away Madalyn decided to call it a day. Back at the US border the immigration officer asked them if they had been to France on vacation. ‘No, sir,’ Bill said, ‘trying to defect.’ ‘Very funny, young man,’ the immigration officer said as he stamped their passports and waved them through.
The day after they returned home, Madalyn took Bill to be enrolled at school. They arrived just in time to hear morning prayers being recited. According to Madalyn’s version of events, Bill was visibly disturbed and so she asked the enrolment officer if her son, an atheist, might be excused prayer. The officer said that would not be possible. An argument developed, at the end of which he said, ‘Then why don’t you sue us?’ And so history was made. In Bill’s version, his mother walked straight up to a young official at the school and started swearing at him.
Madalyn told Bill to keep a log of all religious observance at the school. Madalyn put her request that Bill be excused Bible reading, prayer and the reciting of the Pledge in writing. The school said no, and the battle began. Madalyn wrote to the Baltimore Sun. In her letter she touched on prayer in schools, the legend ‘In God We Trust’ on coins, and the words ‘under God’ in the pledge of allegiance, as three examples of unconstitutional intrusions of the church into the workings of the state. She cited the First and Fourth Amendments. She had done her homework, and she had a stroke of luck. Her letter caught the attention of a sympathetic journalist at the Baltimore Sun, and he decided to take up her cause. He did a bit of investigating and discovered that her challenge would be the first test since 1905 of the ruling that church and state were to be kept separate. (He seems to have overlooked the 1947 ruling in Everson v. Board of Education.)
At Bill’s school, and in every school under the board’s jurisdiction, the Bible or the Lord’s Prayer was invoked before lessons every school day. Similar but varying rules applied across the nation. When the paper announced that Madalyn Murray was to challenge the ruling, calls poured into local radio stations and TV networks.
Madalyn had been keeping Bill away from school but the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) came on board and advised her to send him back. In order to test the judgment, the school would need to expel Bill for staying away from morning prayers and Bible study classes. Only then could a lawsuit follow. The next day Madalyn and a horde of pressmen accompanied Bill to school. Bill heard one reporter ask his mother what hospital he was to be sent to if he were injured. Schoolboy Bill played his part to perfection. He can be seen on film saying, in a sweet unbroken voice, ‘I’m an Atheist. I wish to be an Atheist.’ On the way someone shouted out, ‘Why don’t you move to Russia.’ Bill said he had wanted to shout back, ‘We tried, but they wouldn’t have us.’ On the way home, when there was no press around, he was attacked and could have been seriously injured.
For a while the school refused to play along. And then, worn down by the effort of trying to exclude him from morning prayers before he excluded himself, they played into Madalyn’s hands and expelled him. A lawsuit against the school was filed, marking the beginning of a series of legal challenges. The Board of Education asked the Attorney General of Maryland to rule on the complaint. The case was dismissed on 27 April 1961. Round one to the Baltimore Board of Education. The next day Madalyn filed an appeal. She was energized. She found new things to protest: the ‘Pray for Peace’ Stamps which the Post Office had been issuing from 1956, tax exemption for religious institutions, the altered wording of the Pledge . . .
Her new-found notoriety attracted the attention of Paul Krassner, founder of The Realist magazine. On the masthead of the first issue, which had appeared in the spring of 1958, the magazine declared itself to be a forum for ‘social-political-religious criticism and satire’. Over the years contributors included Ken Kesey, Richard Pryor, Woody Allen, Joseph Heller, Lenny Bruce and Terry Southern. Krassner invited Madalyn Murray to contribute. In her first article Madalyn set the tone of her future writings: ‘I am against religion. I am against schools. I am against apple pies. I am against “Americanism”. I am against mothers. I am against adulterated foods. I am against nuclear fission testing. I am against commercial television. I am against all newspapers . . . I am against Eisenhower, Nixon, Kennedy, Lodge. I’m even against giving the country back to the Indians. Why should the poor fools be stuck with this mess?’ Over the next few years her combative style hardly changed.
Krassner allowed Madalyn to use her column to solicit funds to support her action, and she received thousands of dollars as a result. One of the largest donations was from Carl Brown, an ‘atheist-nudist wheat farmer from Kansas’. His first cheque was for $5,000. He also sent bonds as a gift to her two boys, as well as deeds to a 160-acre site in Kansas on which to set up an atheist colony and atheist university. Madalyn visited the land with a news crew in tow. The locals couldn’t have cared less and Madalyn soon lost interest. She only really thrived on adversity.
In January 1962, the Maryland Court of Appeals ruled four to three that the First and Fourth Amendments weren’t meant ‘to stifle all rapport between government and religion’. The appeal was thrown out. But the school board had made a major misjudgement. In order to uphold their First Amendment defence they had had to insist that school prayers were not religious in nature. On this, the Court of Appeals said only the Supreme Court could make a final ruling. An appeal was lodged with the Supreme Court on 15 May 1962.
A typically trenchant article by Madalyn Murray from the Realist, June 1963
Madalyn was in her element. She had been given a small printing press by one of her supporters, and on 1 July 1962 she brought out the first issue of American Atheists magazine.
Madalyn had appointed Leonard Kerpelman as her attorney. He turned out to be an inspired choice: he had once taken on the case of a man who had been denied permission to hold a bullfight in Baltimore’s Memorial Stadium. He was an effective lawyer but when, over a year later, the day came when he was standing outside the Supreme Court building about to go in and put his case, he got cold feet. ‘I can’t go in. I’m afraid,’ he said to Madalyn. She had to grip his arm and push him into the building. In the event Kerpelman had nothing to fear. Chief Justice Earl Warren was warm and encouraging, and anyway, it soon hardly mattered what either party had to say because the nine Supreme Court justices – seven of whom were practising Christians – began to argue and discuss the case between themselves. When Justice William O. Douglas asked the attorney representing the City of Baltimore if the school board would allow readings from the Koran, it was clear which way the judgment would have to go. The ruling came down on 17 June 1963, eight to one in Madalyn’s favour. The practice of public school prayer was brought to an abrupt end, and it had cost Madalyn less than $20,000. More than 40 per cent of public schools were in violation of the ruling; in some states the proportion rose to 80 per cent. The judgment read:
Madalyn Murray
The place of religion in our society is an exalted one, achieved through a long tradition of reliance on the home, the church, and the inviolable citadel of the individual heart and mind. We have come to recognize through bitter experience that it is not within the power of government to invade that citadel, whether its purpose or effect be to aid or oppose, to advance or retard. In the relationship between man and religion, the State is firmly committed to a position of neutrality. The breach of neutrality that is today a trickling stream may all too soon become a raging torrent, and in the words of Madison, ‘It is proper to take alarm at the first amendment on our Liberties.’
In his statement Justice Clark quoted Jefferson and his ‘admonition against putting the Bible and Testament into the hands of the children at an age when their judgments are not sufficiently matured for religious inquiries’. In his concluding statement he said that the application of the rule that the state be neutral required ‘interpretation of a delicate sort’, but added that ‘the rule itself is clearly and concisely stated in the words of the First Amendment’.
The New York Times ran more than two full pages of coverage with no ads. There was a photograph of Madalyn, her mother Lena and Garth, but bizarrely Bill was not in the photograph.
The judgment was widely criticized. The most reactionary critics accused the judges of being anti-American, and used the ruling to further inflame anti-Communist sentiment: only America and God could stand up to Russia and godlessness. Liberal elements, particularly those who were also religious, welcomed the judgment. Here, finally, was some clarity: the state need only be neutral in regard to religion, not hostile to it.
After the judgment the cheques began to arrive, tens of thousands of dollars from donors across the country. But Madalyn could hardly leave the house without being abused. Stones were thrown through the windows. She was shot at. It was to be the year of her greatest fame, and a year packed with incident.
Bill and Madalyn after the judgment
Not two weeks had passed since the judgment and her father Pup, as Madalyn called him, was dead. The morning of the day he died, Pup was sitting in front of the television as he did every day of the last decade of his life, the volume turned up full as he liked it. Madalyn got into an argument with him, and soon both were shouting to make themselves heard over the television. Madalyn stormed out of the house, her parting shot, ‘You old bastard, I hope you drop dead.’ Nothing particularly unusual about the day so far, but when Madalyn returned home later there was an empty chair in front of the TV. ‘Where’s the old man,’ she asked? ‘You got your wish,’ her mother said tersely. ‘Well, I’ll be,’ said Madalyn, matching her mother’s sangfroid, ‘Where’s the stiff?’ Madalyn at first insisted on the cheapest funeral arrangements possible, but then like many a sentimentalist she had a change of heart and bought the most expensive casket on offer. She kept vigil next to the body for two days and nights.
Without asking her son Bill’s permission, Madalyn invited his girlfriend Susan to come and live with them. Madalyn thought they should get married. Bill had thought he was just having fun. They were both 17 years old. Anyway, Susan needed the permission of her father, Dr Abramovitz, to marry, and he wasn’t about to give it; not because Bill was so young, but because he wasn’t Jewish. Dr Abramovitz filed a petition for the couple’s arrest. The petition was granted and the police turned up at the house. Madalyn told Bill to distract the police while she drove off with Susan out back. Bill, well-built and 6 feet 3 inches tall, shoved an officer and the officer fell over. Bill was beaten and cuffed. His grandmother Lena came out and joined in the fight, and then fell into a pretend swoon. Irv came out and dragged Lena back into the house, where she came to again. Rather than drive off, Madalyn had decided to enter the fray and tried to spray the officers with her tear-gas pen, but she couldn’t get it to work. She scuffled with an officer or two. Bill remembered hearing police shouts of, ‘Hit her again.’ In court a high bond of $12,000 each was placed on Bill and his mother for assault. One of her supporters paid it. The two of them faced long jail sentences. For five counts of assault on five police officers, Bill was looking at 100 years in jail. Madalyn had eight counts of assault filed against her.
Madalyn announced that they had no choice but to flee the state; they were ready to leave for Hawaii in the next 24 hours. Madalyn had considered Cuba, but Hawaii was easier to get into in a hurry. ‘Irv, you don’t have to come,’ she said to her brother, ‘but if you don’t, you’ll have to learn to cook and make your own bed.’ In his memoir Bill wrote: ‘Irv left the room to go pack.’
Madalyn had notified the press of their plans. There were journalists at the gate to see them off. Madalyn told them that they had chosen Hawaii because 80 per cent of the population is Buddhist, and Buddhists, she said, are practically atheists. Her remarks made it to Hawaii before she did. She was front-page news before she had even stepped off the plane. Despite the fact that Buddhists are in a minority in Hawaii and that the Governor was a devout Roman Catholic, the party was warmly received. Madalyn told reporters that they were seeking religious asylum there. In their absence, the court in Maryland gave Madalyn a sentence of a year in jail for contempt of court, Bill six months, plus a $500 fine. Procedures for their extradition were also put into place. In August 1964 Hawaii’s Governor Burns approved Maryland’s call for the Murrays to be extradited. They were arrested, but allowed bail awaiting an appeal hearing.
Apart from the threat of extradition, their time in Hawaii was relatively uneventful. In 1964 Life magazine ran a feature on Madalyn, naming her ‘most hated woman in America’. The article said she looked like a peasant. She didn’t care. She had given up wearing make-up, went bare-legged, her weight ballooned. In photographs she is invariably caught laughing. People who knew her said she was never boring.
In 1965 Madalyn fell for the charms of the self-styled Reverend Keith Rhinehart. He was slim with fine features, not her ideal physically at all, but they soon became inseparable. Rhinehart had set up his own church as a non-profit organization. He was a medium and able to commune with the dead, but his particular superpower was his ability, when the conditions were right, to pull semi-precious stones from about his person; from his chest, his thighs, even from his eyes. The stones conferred healing powers on those who purchased them from him. Rhinehart’s church was a successful business, and with all the tax advantages of a not-for-profit. To his followers he was known as Christos Logos Kumara. He was handsome, smart, charismatic, a flatterer and a fraud. Madalyn was in love. Despite her atheism, Madalyn was intrigued by spiritualism. She had been in the habit of visiting her father’s grave and talking to him for hours.
Madalyn knew Rhinehart had to be a conman but he was a good one: she couldn’t work out how he did it. At one meeting he boldly chose Madalyn herself as the person whom the spirit guide that he had conjured from the other side – Mr Kensington – wished to address. Mr Kensington said that he had three people with him who wished to say something to Madalyn: Laura, Suzanne and Marie. They were the names of three of Madalyn’s relatives, sisters who had remained close to each other all their lives and who had never married. Madalyn had just been thinking about them. As she listened to what they had to tell her, she realized that she was perspiring heavily. Madalyn tried to get Rhinehart to give up his secret but he insisted that he had a real ability to communicate with the departed. She tried, too, to persuade him to stay so that she could perform some controlled tests on him, but Rhinehart soon left Hawaii to try his luck elsewhere.
Next time Madalyn tried to get hold of him he was in prison in Seattle, having been turned in by a 16-year-old hustler. Years later he returned to the jail to put on a show, an event that was written up in the Seattle Times. As master of ceremonies, wearing a number of different women’s dresses during the course of the evening, he doled out presents to the inmates to the value of $35,000, one a gift certificate of $2,000 to be put towards sex-change surgery. ‘Nobody’s straight and nobody is gay in our religion,’ he told the prisoners at the close of the show. ‘They’re just plain sexual.’
Madalyn realized it was only a matter of time before the extradition order was upheld; better to leave Hawaii now – and break bail again – before she was forced out. This time she settled on Mexico. She had been told that forged identity papers would be enough to get her across the border. Her papers identified her as Mary Jane O’Connor, an Irish nun. She crossed the border wearing full religious habit.
Madalyn soon got into trouble in Mexico. She schemed to take control of a small college populated by American students and turn it into an atheist university, but the plan went terribly wrong. Anonymously, she reported the students for drug abuse. All the students were arrested, and they could have faced long jail sentences if strings had not been pulled. In turn, Madalyn was implicated, arrested and deported. The Mexican authorities seem not to have known about Maryland’s judicial interest in her, and she was sent to Houston, Texas. Within a week she was back in Mexico. She needed to get married.
Richard O’Hair was no more Madalyn’s type physically than the Reverend Rhinehart had been, but something between them clicked. He claimed to be an artist, though what kind of artist was never made clear. What O’Hair failed to tell his wife to be was that he was also a CIA informer. For years to come he would file reports on her. Madalyn got an inkling early on that something was amiss when a journalist reported the intended date of their wedding. Only she and Richard knew the date. She came to the conclusion that the apartment was being bugged, and wrote a column about it for The Realist. Richard had been brought up Catholic, and after the wedding he received a postcard from his mother formally disowning him. It wasn’t long before Madalyn was arrested and deported again. The Mexican police told her that if she attempted to leave the plane she would be shot. Madalyn was inclined to take the warning seriously.
The O’Hairs settled in Austin, Texas. On 12 October 1965, the Maryland extradition procedure caught up with her. The Governor of Texas had signed the papers. Madalyn would have to face the music in Maryland. But then, as Bill later wrote, an angel intervened. At the same time as the Governor of Texas got round to reviewing and signing the order, in the Maryland Court of Appeals the charges of murder against a Buddhist were dropped on the grounds that the jury had been required to swear to a personal God. The defendant’s lawyers argued that in Buddhism there is no such being as a personal God. His First Amendment Rights had been violated. The appeal court judges agreed. Between 2,000 and 3,000 grand jury indictments in Maryland were wiped off the books. Madalyn O’Hair’s was one of them. Just like that, she was free. She was to spend the rest of her life in Austin, Texas, working hard to keep religion out of public life and strengthening her organization, American Atheists.
On 6 November 1967 Madalyn O’Hair, now aged 48, was one of the guests on the first ever Phil Donahue Show. The audience was entirely female. There were murmurs of disapproval from the start when Donahue announced her as the woman responsible for ending prayer in public schools. She ripped out a page from the Bible on air. During the commercial break Donahue walked among the audience. The audience was animated, asking question after question. Donahue realized that they were better questions than the ones he had prepared. After the break he decided, on the spur of the moment, to make a change: he would walk through the audience with a mike, bringing the audience into the show. And so Phil Donahue’s distinctive style was born: provoke your audience, then walk among them with a microphone. It was a style of TV that was much imitated, the classic daytime chat-show format.
Madalyn O’Hair had become a fine orator in the style of evangelists like Jimmy Swaggart, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson and Oral Roberts. Her arguments were always clear. She said at one point that atheism is not just about challenging the ultimate authority of God, it is about understanding that if there is no such authority then all authority should be challenged, whether it is the state or an employer. By June 1968 O’Hair would have her own radio show, American Atheist Radio Series. In December 1968 Madalyn Murray O’Hair would use her radio show to challenge the authority of NASA.