Wednesday, April 18th marks the 150th anniversary of the birthday of Clarence Seward Darrow. Clarence Darrow is perhaps best known for his involvement in the Scopes trial arguing in behalf of John Scopes. Scopes, a biology teacher, was being tried for teaching evolution in the state of Tennessee in the year 1925, in direct defiance of Tennessee's anti-evolution act. Although there is a tendency to view Darrow as the "evolution" lawyer, he was also involved in many other well-known trials.

Clarence Darrow was born April 18, 1857. After starting a career as a school teacher at a very young age, he decided to become a lawyer. At the age of twenty, he studied law for one year at a school of law in Ann Arbor, Michigan. After that, his legal education took the form of on-the-job training. He was employed by the city of Chicago as an attorney and then by the Chicago and Northwestern Railway as their general attorney. It was in this position that he met Eugene V. Debs, later a Socialist Party candidate for president, and became the defender of the railroad Pullman car workers in the railroad strike between the American Railway Union and the railroad owners. From this point on, Darrow was seen as a defender of the working class and an advocate of civil liberties.

Information about Clarence Darrow is available online as well as in the library. The Clarence Darrow Homepage is a portion of a website done by the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law. It provides background information about Clarence Darrow as well as information about some of his most famous cases. The PBS series American Experience has information on its webpage concerning a special called Monkey Trial and biographical information on Clarence Darrow. For those interested in unusual information, the FBI has made available 11 pages of its file on Clarence Darrow under the Freedom of Information Act. Most unusual of all is Findagrave, a website where you can look at the gravesite of a famous person, or in this case, see the site where the ashes of Clarence Darrow were scattered.

The library has some biographies of Clarence Darrow, as well as some books discussing his most notable trials: The people v. Clarence Darrow: the bribery trial of America's greatest lawyer; Arc of justice: a saga of race, civil rights and murder in the Jazz age; The crime of the century : the Leopold and Loeb case; Big Bill Haywood and the radical union movement; Summer for the gods : the Scopes trial and America's continuing debate over science and religion and The great Tennessee monkey trial, a downloadable audiobook available through the state library. The database Biography Resource Center, which is available on the library's website, is an excellent source of information on Clarence Darrow. It can be accessed from home using your library card barcode.