Freedom to Teach – Scopes Finally Vindicated in Epperson Case
In Epperson v. Arkansas, decided on this day, the Supreme Court declared unconstitutional an Arkansas law prohibiting the teaching of evolution in public schools.
With this decision, the Court finally addressed the issues raised but not resolved in the famous Scopes “Monkey Trial,” involving a similar Tennessee law: academic freedom and the place of religion in American public life.
Susan Epperson was a 10th grade biology teacher at Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. The law prohibiting the teaching of evolution had been passed in 1928. Interestingly, Central High School in Little Rock was the scene of the famous school integration crisis in 1957.
The Scopes controversy originated on March 21, 1925 when the state of Tennessee passed a law prohibiting the teaching of evolution in the public schools. The ACLU agreed to defend biology teacher John T. Scopes, and the trial began on July 10, 1925. The dramatic high point of the trial occurred during Clarence Darrow’s cross-examination of William Jennings Bryan on July 20, 1925 when he got Bryan to concede that the Book of Genesis was not the literal word of God. Scopes was nonetheless subsequently convicted of teaching evolution in violation of the Tennessee law. The case never reached the Supreme Court, however, because the trial judge erred when imposing sentence. The conviction was overturned, and the state of Tennessee, embarrassed by the publicity surrounding the law and the trial, chose not to retry Scopes.
The Court: “Arkansas’ law cannot be defended as an act of religious neutrality. Arkansas did not seek to excise from the curricula of its schools and universities all discussion of the origin of man. The law’s effort was confined to an attempt to blot out a particular theory because of its supposed conflict with the Biblical account, literally read.”
Read the interview with Susan Epperson: Peter Irons, The Courage of their Convictions: Sixteen Americans Who Fought Their Way to the Supreme Court (1988); Chapter 9, pp. 205-230.
Listen to the oral argument in the case: http://www.oyez.org/cases/1960-1969/1968/1968_7
Read: Edward J. Larson, Summer of the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing Debate over Science and Religion (1997)
Learn more about science education and evolution: http://ncse.com/evolution