John T. Scopes

At issue was high-school teacher John T. Scopes’s alleged violation of a Tennessee state law that banned the teaching of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. The trial’s proceedings illuminated many of the cultural tensions in 1920s American society: secularism versus fundamentalism, science versus religious dogma, and modernism

Scopes Trial) of John T. Scopes, a high-school teacher in Dayton, Tennessee, who had admittedly violated the state’s law forbidding the teaching of evolution.

…grew steadily until 1925, when John T. Scopes, a biology teacher in Dayton, Tennessee, was tried for violating a law common to many Southern states prohibiting the teaching of the theory of evolution. Although Scopes was found guilty of breaking the law, both the law itself and fundamentalist beliefs were…

…of a Tennessee science teacher, John T. Scopes, to defy a Tennessee law forbidding the teaching of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. It has been active in overturning censorship laws, often through test cases resulting from the deliberate purchase of banned material and consequent arrest and trial. The ACLU has…

…such diverse clients as teacher John T. Scopes in the 1925 Tennessee “Monkey Trial”; the Jehovah’s Witnesses, which won free-press rights in 1938; James Joyce, who had the ban lifted from his novel Ulysses; and Henry Ford, who was granted the right to distribute antiunion pamphlets. The ACLU