Word: wingfield
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...narrator and player, providing "truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion." The message: we will be witnesses to Williams' personal history as well as to dramatic fiction. The fusion results, of course, in a richly poetic play about three people who are trapped by circumstance and one another. Amanda Wingfield, an erstwhile Southern belle, clings to the past. Her daughter Laura is a physical and emotional cripple who can bear to do nothing more challenging than tend her collection of miniature glass animals. Laura's brother Tom, a warehouse worker with a poet's soul, longs to escape the family...
Those 21 words brought not a blessing but an immediate curse upon Bishop Knox, principal of Wingfield High School in Jackson, Mississippi. Last month Knox allowed the prayer to be read over the school's public address system after students had voted 490 to 96 for it. But for Jackson school officials that was an unforgivable trespass by religion into secular territory. Knox was fired...
...that prayer was permissible at graduation ceremonies if it was nonproselytizing, nonsectarian, student initiated and student led. Thus, when students approached him about praying in school, the principal, a born-again Christian, allowed them to take a vote on the issue. Moreover, the text of the prayer read at Wingfield High refers to no specific religion or god. Knox, however, ignored a school lawyer's warning that he was contravening the Constitution. After the prayer was read, Knox was placed on leave and then fired. The former principal, citing the Court of Appeals decision, insists, "I have done nothing wrong...
Fordice's critics say prayer is already allowed in schools: students may pray silently by themselves; they just can't force others to join them. At Wingfield, however, even though 96 kids voted against the measure, everyone had to listen. Says Lynn Watkins, director of the Mississippi American Civil Liberties Union: "What ((Fordice)) wishes to see is his view of religious freedom, which invades and tramples the rights of others." Some black leaders are wary that black supporters of the drive for school prayer are being sold antebellum values cloaked as piety...
...many supporters of school prayer, the issue is values, not constitutionality. Last week, on a cool, cloudy morning outside Wingfield High School, a group of students gathered privately, as they do every morning shortly before school starts, to hold hands around the flagpole and intone the Lord's Prayer. Among them was junior Stacie Dennis, for whom prayer is an answer, not a problem. "We need it 'cause of all this violence and stuff," she said. "You didn't see all this violence in school when they were praying at school." A classmate, Jamie Meadows, agreed: "It won't hurt...