Madalyn Mays was born on April 13, 1919, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the woman who would become America's most famous atheist activist.
Madalyn Mays was born on April 13, 1919, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to John Irvin Mays and Lena Christine Mays. She grew up in a household that, despite her later fierce atheism, was nominally Presbyterian.
Her early life in western Pennsylvania during the interwar period shaped a fiercely independent and combative personality. She attended the University of Pittsburgh briefly and later earned a bachelor's degree from Ashland College in Ohio, going on to study law at South Texas College of Law, where she earned a J.D. in 1953, although she never practiced law formally in a traditional sense.
This birth marked the beginning of a life that would radically reshape the landscape of American civil liberties. Decades later, Mays — by then known as Madalyn Murray O'Hair — would become a lightning rod for the debate over the separation of church and state, founding the organization American Atheists and successfully suing to remove mandatory prayer from American public schools. Her birthdate is documented across multiple biographical sources, including the Texas State Historical Association and Encyclopedia.com, as the starting point of a controversial and consequential public life.
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