IN JULY 1945 Vashti McCollum, a dance teacher at the University of Illinois, filed a suit against the Champaign School Board in order to stop taxpayers’ money being spent on religious instruction in schools. Three years later, as a result of her perseverance, the US Supreme Court made a landmark judgment, banning religious education in public schools.

The year that McCollum started her campaign, her nine-year-old son was being ostracised for not attending Christian education studies at school. McCollum spoke to the school authorities, but they were unresponsive, and so, enlisting the aid of the local Unitarian minister and some sympathetic Jewish businessmen based in Chicago, she filed a suit arguing that minority groups were discriminated against when schools got involved with religion.

The county court ruled against her, as did the Illinois Supreme Court. By June 1947, when the US Supreme Court agreed to hear her case, McCollum had gathered a great deal of support from minority religious groups as well as from fellow humanists.

In March 1948 McCollum was informed that the court had ruled by a majority of 8 to 1 that the public school systems could not assist religious groups in giving instruction and thus spreading their faith.

McCollum’s family were nevertheless punished for her having achieved this result, which is still questioned by conservative religious groups. During the legal battle she lost her job. The family received threatening phone calls, their house was pelted with rotten vegetables and their cat was lynched. Her husband was prevented from becoming a full university professor for ten years.

Vashti Ruth Cromwell was named after Ahasuerus’s beautiful queen in the Book of Esther, who is divorced when she refuses to appear before the drunken king and his courtiers. Her father, an architect, was president of the Rochester, New York, Society of Free Thinkers. He had managed to persuade the education commissioner in New York State to end religious instruction in one county.

At the University of Illinois, she majored in political science and met John Paschal McCollum, whom she married in 1933.

After the events of 1948 she settled into bringing up their three children. In 1951 she published an account of her struggle, One Woman’s Fight. The following year she was elected to the board of the American Humanist Association. She was its president from 1962 to 1965.

She is survived by her children.

Vashti McCollum, humanist campaigner, was born on November 6, 1912. She died on August 20, 2006, aged 93.