John T. Scopes

John Thomas Scopes (August 3, 1900 – October 21, 1970) was a teacher in Dayton, Tennessee, who was charged on May 5, 1925 for violating Tennessee's Butler Act, which prohibited the teaching of evolution in Tennessee schools. He was tried in a case known as the Scopes Trial, in which he was found guilty and fined $100.

Biography

Scopes was born in 1900 on a farm in Paducah, Kentucky where he was raised before moving to Danville, Illinois as a teenager. In 1917 he moved to Salem, Illinois where he was a member of the class of 1919 at Salem High School. He attended the University of Illinois for a short time before leaving for health reasons. He earned a degree at the University of Kentucky in 1924, with a major in law and a minor in geology. Scopes moved to Dayton where he took a job as the Rhea County High School's football coach and occasionally filled in as substitute teacher when regular members of the staff were off work.

Scopes's involvement in the so-called Scopes Monkey Trial came about after the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) announced that it would finance a test case challenging the constitutionality of the Butler Act if they could find a Tennessee teacher willing to act as a defendant.