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Reading Race into the Scopes Trial: African American Elites, Science, and Fundamentalism
Jeffrey P. Moran
| Among the many visitors to the famous trial of John Thomas Scopes in Dayton, Tennessee, in July 1925 was a tall, well-dressed African American named W. H. Moses. The Reverend Mr. Moses was campaign director for the National Baptist Convention, the largest African American religious organization in the nation, and he had traveled to Dayton with a group of African American preachers, students, professors, and physicians from the border South. As he viewed the trial and the sideshows around it, Moses explained to reporters and curious onlookers that the controversy was particularly relevant to African Americans. A lack of broader education, Moses noted, had left black ministers "proverbially hostile to science." For that reason, the "college Negro[es]" had become prejudiced against "Negro preachers and the religion of their fathers to a very harmful degree." Moses hoped that the trial would demonstrate "that Christianity is strengthened by science rather than weakened" and that the conflict would thus restore the confidence of "the darker races" in Christianity.1 For the heavily churched black community, this was not a trivial matter. |
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Moses and his group were not the only African Americans with a keen interest in the trial. Black newspapers and black churches sent eyewitnesses to Dayton, editorialists and intellectuals commented with great acerbity on the "monkey business" in Tennessee, and African American ministers delivered hundreds of sermons on the topic of evolution and the Bible. In Kansas City one African American couple even teamed up to knife a friend who had taken what they considered the wrong side of the dispute.2 Clearly the Scopes trial mattered, and mattered deeply, to many African Americans. |
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And yet historians sifting through the great evidentiary sediment left behind by the trial have generally overlooked both the importance of race in the antievolution controversy and the importance of the Scopes trial for African Americans. Race did not fit easily into Frederick Lewis Allen's influential retelling of the Scopes trial as the last gasp of religious traditionalism in the face of scientific progress, nor has it fitted comfortably into more recent efforts to present the trial as a clash within Protestantism or a fight for local autonomy.3 Indeed, reading race into the Scopes trial significantly unsettles our understanding of an event whose meaning has long seemed well established. |
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African American interpretations of Scopes were not merely darker reflections of the white world. On the contrary, in an era of tremendous religious and cultural ferment within African America, secular black intellectuals employed the Scopes trial for their own separate purposes. Looking outward, African American intellectuals invoked Scopes and the respectability of science as part of their struggle against white supremacy in the South: they identified with John Scopes as a victim of southern repression, and they claimed that antievolutionism derived much of its strength from racist assumptions that resonated with white southerners. Turning to gaze upon their own race, however, many black intellectuals also found that the Scopes controversy revealed troubling strains of Fundamentalism and religious dominance at a time when they felt the race should be moving forward under modern, secular leadership. The Reverend W. H. Moses was right about the strains the race was facing. Within the unsettled situation brought on by the Great Migration and the increased urbanization of African America, the Scopes trial became a part of the broader contest for cultural leadership. Who was going to lead the race—the preacher or the professional? As products largely of the movement to the North and to the cities, members of the secular black elite employed the Scopes trial in their twin struggle against white supremacy in the South and ministerial dominance throughout African America.4 |
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