My first introduction to the July 1925 Scopes “Monkey” trial was when the movie Inherit the Wind was broadcast on TV in the mid-1960s, when I was in 6th grade. My mother watched it with me, since she wanted me to know that “science and religion aren’t against each other, they work together.” At the time, we all thought the movie was an accurate retelling of the Scopes trial, but it certainly was not. Five years later I learned that the play and movie were written to shine a light on McCarthyism and other versions of political attacks on freedom of speech. Mom loved the movie. She even added an emotional lesson of her own. She told me about her high school English teacher in Augusta, Georgia, Miss Eleanor Boatwright, who clearly despised Eugene Talmadge: the Governor of Georgia who had hired a gang of community leaders in 1941 to create a list of books to be removed from all Georgia libraries because they “taught evolution, subversiveness and that the Bible was a myth.” In addition to Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, Talmadge also banned Social Problems and Sociology by Charles Ellwood, because “it uses the Darwinian theory for much more than to discredit the teachings of the Bible. It argues for the equalization of the blacks and the whites, that the negro is the white man’s equal.” My mother was bound and determined that Miss Boatwright’s teaching would not be in vain.
