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W.L. Poteat, Evolution, and Academic Freedom

When the nation read the coverage of State v. John Scopes in July 1925, the teaching of evolution was already a hot issue in North Carolina. Governor Cameron Morrison had rejected recommended high school textbooks that taught evolution in 1924, and while the General Assembly had not officially commented or legislated, public opinion was opposed to teaching evolution.1

Colorado preacher T.T. Martin, a Mississippi native, had made North Carolina and Wake Forest President William Louis Poteat players in the controversy when he targeted Poteat and Wake Forest in a series of articles in the Western Recorder starting in 1920.2 Martin would later be a witness in the Scopes trial.3 New York World journalist George Coad found evidence that the entire evolution controversy was precipitated by opposition to the work Poteat was doing at Wake Forest.4

Poteat was an unlikely protagonist in the story. A native of North Carolina, he started teaching at Wake Forest a year after his graduation. He was the first biology professor in the South to use the laboratory method. He and his siblings constituted a kind of royal family of Baptist education in the Carolinas. His brother Edwin was president of Furman University and his sister Ida was an art professor at Meredith College.5 Poteat’s graduate education in Germany, which led to his incorporation of the laboratory method, meant that he sought to approach biology and evolution from a uniquely objective (i.e. apolitical) perspective.6

Poteat may have been an attractive target for Martin and others because of his association with a Baptist college.7 Indeed, Poteat was a prominent leader in the Baptist Church more broadly. For Poteat, evolution was not a battlefield between church and secular education. He believed that evolution was not inconsistent with Christian faith. His powerful arguments about belief in God and the theory of evolution, along with personal loyalty of former students, enabled him to withstand years of attacks.8

The Biblical Recorder, the periodical of North Carolina Baptists, under the control of Wake Forest alumnus Livingston Johnson, gave Poteat space to advocate and restate his position as the debate deepened. Poteat used the opportunity to assert that “a Christian [may] be an evolutionist,” noting that there is no less wonder in the settled doctrine of evolution than in the doctrine of creation.9 In a pattern that would feel eerily familiar to people who have tired of the back-and-forth technocratic political debates of today, readers of the time tired of the controversy and increasingly fell prey to the simplistic arguments against Poteat.10

Wake Forest trustees interviewed and supported Poteat unanimously, primarily on the grounds that he was espousing sound doctrine.11 Others in the State supported him out of concern for intellectual freedom and freedom of expression. The Raleigh Times editorialized, “The stand of the Wake Forest Old Gold and Black against the bigots in the denomination… is not a defense of President William Louis Poteat alone; it is a stand for the spiritual and intellectual freedom of every sentient person in North Carolina.”12 

Among the highest praise for Poteat came from Chapel Hill. Frank Porter Graham, history professor and later president of the University of North Carolina, wrote “may we also salute with equal respect President William Louis Poteat, who, by his stand at Wake Forest, has been, for all our colleges, the bugger state against unreason, the shock absorber of intolerance, and the first line trench against bigotry lo! these many years.”13

That kind of achievement, broad respect, and deep praise would be a wonderful asset in the history of Wake Forest University, except that the story must be read alongside the parallel writing and advocacy Poteat did in the field of eugenics, taking on a controlling function in the process of evolution that seems at once inconsistent with Poteat’s reconciliation between evolution and faith, while also taking him down an unfortunate spur from the forward march of scientific history. Though he wasn’t involved in the founding of The Eugenics Board of North Carolina—the institutionalized application of eugenics in North Carolina—his work was certainly cited in support.14

Perhaps this is why Poteat’s story is best used in support of freedom of expression and academic freedom. Poteat created space for competing ideas that were surprisingly progressive for the age. Some of those ideas have flourished and supported further scientific progress. Eugenics, on the other hand, has not made the intellectual evolutional cut. Without minimizing the disastrous human costs of the eugenics movement, we can at least say that free expression eventually won on both counts.

Matthew T. Phillips | 11 June 2025

  1. Introduction, The Evolution Controversy in North Carolina in the 1920s, https://exhibits.lib.unc.edu/exhibits/show/evolution/introduction (last visited Jun. 3, 2025). ↩︎
  2. Randal L. Hall, William Louis Poteat: A Leader of the Progressive-Era South 134 (2000), http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/wfu/detail.action?docID=1915505. ↩︎
  3. T.T. Martin, The Evolution Controversy in North Carolina in the 1920s, https://exhibits.lib.unc.edu/exhibits/show/evolution/biographies/martin (last visited Jun. 3, 2025). ↩︎
  4. Susan Cameron Linder, William Louis Poteat and the Evolution Controversy, 40 N.C. Hist. Rev. 135, 138 (1963). ↩︎
  5. Hall, supra note 2 at 44–45. ↩︎
  6. Linder, supra note 4 at 135. ↩︎
  7. Martin wrote, “The Baptists of North Carolina are partners with Chicago University [sic] in fastening this German-ruining, world-crushing, soul-destroying doctrine on the South….” T.T. Martin (Feb. 5, 1920), quoted in Id. at 138 n. 7. ↩︎
  8. William Louis Poteat, The Evolution Controversy in North Carolina in the 1920s, https://exhibits.lib.unc.edu/exhibits/show/evolution/biographies/poteat (last visited Jun. 3, 2025). ↩︎
  9. Linder, supra note 4 at 139. ↩︎
  10. Id. at 140. ↩︎
  11. Id. at 141. ↩︎
  12. The Raleigh Times (Apr. 25, 1922), quoted in Id. ↩︎
  13. Frank P. Graham, Evolution, the University, and the People, 13 Carolina Alumni Rev. 205, 206 (1925). ↩︎
  14. John Railey, Advocate: WF President Embraced Eugenics Movement, Winston-Salem Journal, Dec. 9, 2002, at 5. ↩︎