On this date in 1934, atheist activist Jimmy Charles Dunne was born in Houston, Texas, to Frieda (née Yost) and Julius Dunne. His mother was a Nebraska-born nurse who met his father in Chicago, where he was studying to be a podiatrist, a quest he gave up during the throes of the Depression and eventually founded a successful advertising company employing several salesmen.
The eldest of five children, he remembers his father taking them to Catholic Mass on Sundays. “As a teenager, I had doubts about religion — from Mary, mother of Jesus, being a virgin to the pope being infallible,” he said at age 90, describing himself as “a 100 percent atheist and a humanist.”
After high school graduation, he worked for a summer at a men’s clothing store before enrolling in 1952 at Texas A&M, an all-male college without enough social life to suit him. He transferred after a year to the University of Houston, where he graduated. He then worked in New Orleans in the U.S. Department of Labor’s wage and hour division.
He tamed his fear of public speaking by completing a Toastmasters International course, then started teaching math in middle school in Houston while operating a singles dance club during his off hours at various venues for three years starting in 1961.
Using corporal punishment to spank recalcitrant students bothered him as cruel and ineffective, so he founded People Opposed to Paddling Students (POPS) and started speaking out, appearing on “The Phil Donahue Show,” “Good Morning America” and other shows. He addressed school boards, the Texas Legislature and a U.S. congressional committee on the need to put away the paddles. Newsweek magazine detailed his efforts in a story on June 22, 1987.
As he detailed in a January 2025 speech titled “From Introvert to Extrovert to Atheist” to the Unitarian Fellowship of Houston, once when President Jimmy Carter came to Houston, Dunne asked him if using wooden boards on students constituted child abuse. The president replied that they had spanked their sons but stopped the practice after daughter Amy was born. Corporal punishment in schools is still legal in Texas and several other states as of this writing in 2025.
His career also includes service in the U.S. Army and employment with the Interstate Commerce Commission in Washington, D.C. He and his first wife Lindacarol, who worked as a draftsperson, married in 1968 and had a daughter Melody (b. 1971). Divorcing after 10 years, he married Melinda, a junior high English teacher who died from uterine cancer in their 21st year of marriage. He and Karen, his third wife, met at a current events discussion group and are divorced but still living together.
Dunne, an inveterate letter writer on behalf of progressive causes, served for five years as president of Humanists of Houston, led a local Amnesty International chapter and still gathers regularly with a lunch group called the Hungry Heathens. He supports the Freedom From Religion Foundation as a Life Member “for all the enlightenment they are doing through education and taking on legal issues concerning separation of church and state.”
His activism has involved campaigning against long-term solitary confinement in prison and working with the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty. He credits Pope Francis for “inching” the church forward in a few regards but roundly criticizes it for barring gay marriage, birth control and female clergy. “It’s good that we have ‘cafeteria Catholics’ who pick and choose which pronouncements they will honor.”
