“You would look so cute without an eye to offend you and without a tongue to offend me and mine.” —Hate mail to Vashti Cromwell McCollum
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Rosenstein, a Chicago native, teaches television production at the U. of I. His best-known documentary prior to this one is In Whose Honor?, a 1997 study of Native American mascots in sports. He’s lived in Champaign since 1985, and says McCollum’s story is local lore there, which is how he came to hear about it, seven or eight years ago. “I wondered if she was alive,” he says. By 2005 he was filming interviews with her in the Champaign elderly housing facility where she spent her final years. At 92 she was weathered and bent but still staunch as she recalled the day her son came home from grade school with a drawing he’d made of Christ rising from the dead.
Vashti and her husband, John “Pappy” McCollum, a professor in the university’s College of Agriculture, were humanists and rationalists. They didn’t believe in God or the Bible. She came to this more or less directly, she said, having been brought up by nonreligious parents (her father, Arthur Cromwell, later founded the Society of Free Thinkers in Rochester, New York). Pappy, raised in the south, might have been reacting to an overdose of fire and brimstone. A handsome couple and smart—she’d gone to Cornell on a scholarship—they were bringing up their three boys, James, Dannel, and Errol, in a gabled home surrounded by evergreens on West John Street—a picture-book American family, wholesome and typical except for their lack of religion.
McCollum wanted the case argued on the grounds of church-state separation, but Chapman had more dramatic plans—most of which backfired even as they drew national publicity. He brought in a parade of practitioners of other religious doctrines, elicited a teacher’s statement that Jim was a misfit, included testimony from McCollum’s by-then sensationally radical father, insulted believers himself at every turn, and finally put the ten-year-old on the stand to testify—to the horror of most observers—that he had stopped believing in God before he went to kindergarten.
Sun 4/17, 1:30 PM
Evanston Public Library
1703 Orrington, Evanston
847-448-8600, epl.org
