Engel V. Vitale
The year is 1962, and the Supreme Court is about to make a landmark ruling, concerning the constitutionality of faculty lead prayer in school. Democratic President John F. Kennedy is in his second year of his term. Many Americans saw the Kennedy administration as a liberal Presidency that was moderately pro-civil rights, and suspected that some changes would come during this term. The civil rights movement had been gaining more ground in ten years than it had in the past fifty. The landmark court decision Brown v. The Board of Education (1954) had outlawed public education segregation. Yet in 1957, the U.S. Armies 101st Division had to be brought in to desegregate Little Rock, Arkansas highschool to allow nine black teenagers to be educated in the predominantly white facility. So schools in the United States had been experiencing significant change before the Engel ruling. In 1962, the U.S. was still engaged in a bitter arms-race against the Soviet Union, with barely a year passing since the U.S.S.R. had successfully detonated a nuclear bomb. Tensions between the two countries had already been intensifying, particularly over the issue of Cuba. Cuba, just ninety miles south of the Florida coast was controlled by Communist
In the House of Representatives, the Democratic Party held supremacy over the Republicans. New York state law didn't require it either, yet they did permit it. Not all teachers would be so sensible. A biology teacher challenged an Arkansas state law that prohibited state-funded schools from teaching the evolution theory. In combining the cases of Schempp and Murray family, and using Engel as a primary precedent, on June 17, 1963, the Supreme Court voted 8 to 1 in favor of making Bible-reading and saying the Lords Prayer in schools unconstitutional. announced a trade embargo on all Cuban products and travel. Interestingly he begins with what the case was not about. The Lemon Test said that the government action must: 1. Justice Black wrote the majority opinion. The National Christian Council of Churches saw merit in the court's decision, reasoning that it protected all religions by hindering the development of a public school religion, which had little do with either Christianity or Judaism. Students who did not agree with the prayer were given three alternatives: 1. On April 17, 1961, a botched attempt to invade Cuba, later named "the Bay of Pigs" left Cuba immensely distrusting of it's northern neighbor.
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Acceptance Essays
