This date, in 1925, was the first day of proceedings of The State of Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes, commonly known as the Scopes trial or Scopes Monkey Trial. A high school teacher, John T. Scopes, was accused of violating the Butler Act, a Tennessee state law which outlawed the teaching of human evolution in public schools.
The trial was deliberately staged in order to attract publicity to the small town of Dayton, Tennessee, where it was held. Scopes was unsure whether he had ever actually taught evolution, but he incriminated himself deliberately so the case could have a defendant. Scopes was represented by the American Civil Liberties Union, which had offered to defend anyone accused of violating the Butler Act in an effort to challenge the constitutionality of the law.
William Jennings Bryan, a three-time presidential candidate and former secretary of state, argued for the prosecution, while famed labor and criminal lawyer Clarence Darrow served as the principal defense attorney for Scopes. The trial publicized the fundamentalist–modernist controversy, which set modernists, who believed evolution could be consistent with religion, against fundamentalists, who believed the literal word of God as revealed in the Bible took priority over all human knowledge.
In 1968, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled in Epperson v. Arkansas that such bans contravene the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment because their primary purpose is religious. Tennessee had repealed the Butler Act the previous year.
All you need to know about Oklahoma…
And you think it’s tough to get stuff built today. The Cologne Cathedral took approximately 600 years to build…
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Today is the birthday, in 1947, of Arlo Guthrie, US singer, songwriter, son of folksinger Woody Guthrie, (1967 album ‘Alice’s Restaurant’, 1972 US No.18 single ‘The City Of New Orleans’). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fF1lqEQFVUo
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