John T. Scopes

…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…

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.

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