Jerry SummersRhea County became famous in 1925 when three regulars at the F.E. Robinson Drug Store – the local manager of Cumberland Coal Co., the superintendent of schools and attorney Sue K. Hicks – planned a trial that would give the county seat, Dayton, much needed publicity.
The threesome recruited 24-year-old John T. Scopes, a substitute biology teacher, to admit to teaching the theory of evolution. The “drugstore conspirators” thus engineered a case that would test the constitutionality of the Butler Act, recently passed by the Tennessee Legislature.
The act prohibited the teaching of evolution in any state-funded school even though Tennessee required teachers to use a textbook endorsing evolution.
Attorneys Sue Hicks and his brother Herbert Hicks formed the original prosecution team in the Scopes trial. Sue was the youngest child of Charles Wesley, a prominent Madisonville lawyer, and Susanna Coltharp Hicks. His father named the infant in honor of his mother, who died a few days after childbirth.
Responding to an advertisement by the ACLU for a challenge to the Butler Act, Sue Hicks played a leading role in a trial that pitted modernists, who said evolution was not inconsistent with religion, against fundamentalists, who said the word of God as revealed in the Bible took priority over all human knowledge.