Talk:McCollum v. Board of Education

Merge recommendation
Vashti McCollum had no notability apart from this case; the bio article should be merged into the one for the court case. MisfitToys 17:01, 29 August 2006 (UTC) It is very, very wrong to go and establish a "prayer time" or anything that has to do with trying to establish or impose a certain religion in a school. The father of the Constitution Thomas Jeffferson said that their should be a " a wall between church and state". It is extremely wrong to influence minors with some kind of religion. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.172.183.209 (talk) 02:50, 12 December 2008 (UTC)

Oppose merger
Saying that "Vashti McCollum had no notability apart from this case" is like saying Lee Harvey Oswald had no notability other than as alleged assassin of President John F. Kennedy, or that Todd Beamer had no notability other than his part in defending United Airlines Flight 93 during the September 11, 2001 attacks.

Whether or not you agree with McCollum's stance in the famous case, or with her outspoken views on church vs. state issues after she became well-known, the outcome of McCollum's court battle affected millions of people and left its mark on American jurisprudence and on the relations between education and religion. Her biography is thus as legitimate a subject for Wikipedia as are the biographies of Oswald and Beamer &mdash; whose few minutes of fame were fleeting but which also left a deep impact.

I view the New York Times' publication of McCollum's obituary as further support of the legitimacy of her life story as encyclopedic subject matter.

The biographical article on McCollum is a new article and is little more than a stub today, so any motion to merge is premature. An ample amount of additional material on the lawsuit and on McCullom's life both before and after the case exist, and can (and should) be folded into the appropriate articles by me and other Wikipedians as time permits.

The biographical material (beyond basic identification) has no place in the article on the lawsuit itself, and the policy Wiki is not paper suggests that we do not need to be needlessly restrictive about creating articles about legitimate topics. I consequently feel the merge would be ill-advised. Oppose. &mdash; JonRoma 01:59, 30 August 2006 (UTC)


 * But certainly Oswald's article has a huge amount of material on his life prior to the assassination. McCollum's article is entirely about the court case. Even the NYT obit devoted only a couple of sentences to her life apart from the case. MisfitToys 23:42, 30 August 2006 (UTC)


 * Sure, but as noted above in my response,
 * The McCollum article is relatively new and a stub, whereas Oswald's is neither. Saying the McCollum article is too short and too narrow in scope to deserve its own space defeats the goal of fleshing out stub articles in order to increase the amount of knowledge to be found in Wikipedia.
 * The New York Times is constrained in space; there is no such constraint for Wikipedia, provided the topic is proper material for an encyclopedia.
 * Regards. &mdash; JonRoma 01:08, 31 August 2006 (UTC)

Court membership
The infobox at right lists a "Court Membership" with Tom Clark and Sherman Minton, who did not join the Court until 1949. Their names should be replaced by Frank Murphy and Wiley Rutledge, who were on the Court in 1948. There is no access to that part of the infobox by using the edit option, someone with greater access should correct this error.Princetoniac (talk) 18:41, 16 March 2012 (UTC)