Long before La.’s new law, Ky. parents won a major Ten Commandments case The Washington Post
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Anne Long can still recall the Ten Commandments hanging on the wall of her childhood classroom in a Kentucky public school some 70 years ago.
They were enormous and “kind of yellow and plastic,” Long, 82 said. “And nobody paid any attention to it.”
That changed when Kentucky passed a law in 1978 mandating that the Ten Commandments be placed in all public classrooms. Long’s mother, Anne Bowers, joined three other Louisville residents to challenge what they argued was an affront to the Constitution. The case wound its way to the Supreme Court, which ultimately struck down the Kentucky law: There was no secular purpose to post the Ten Commandments in classrooms, the court stated in its 1980 Stone v. Graham decision.
