EIGHTY-TWO YEARS ago this week, Dayton, Tennessee received its summer of fame with Scopes v. State. The town’s charming county courthouse bloomed with celebrities–among them, superstar populist William Jennings Bryan, attorney Clarence Darrow, and journalist H.L. Mencken, whose 25,000 words on the impending trial would echo between the nation’s coasts. At the center of the moment sat John Scopes, the quiet schoolteacher accused of teaching evolution from a textbook mandated, ironically, by the state.

George William Hunter’s A Civic Biology: Presented in Problems (1914) was the book that sparked the controversy. Condemned as heretical in 1925, today it would seem to be a manual for enlightenment’s battle against religion’s perceived mysticism. Yet if John Scopes were to teach the very same Civic Biology in a modern classroom, he would probably be put on trial again. Because buried under the dust of history is the fact that this progressive, pro-evolution text was also quite racist.