HYDE PARK — Famed attorney and Hyde Parker Clarence Darrow was honored this week at his namesake bridge in Jackson Park, a full century after the landmark “Scopes Monkey Trial.”

A few dozen people gathered Thursday for a flower-tossing ceremony at the Clarence Darrow Memorial Bridge in Jackson Park to celebrate Darrow’s ongoing influence as an attorney and activist. The annual gathering is organized by the Clarence Darrow Commemorative Committee.

“We have to know where we’ve been to know where we’re at and where we’re going,” said James Connelly, a retired attorney who has attended the ceremonies for three decades.

This year’s event honored the 100th anniversary of the Scopes trial. The trial centered on high school teacher John Scopes, who intentionally broke a Tennessee law banning the theory of evolution from being taught in schools.

Darrow defended Scopes, who was convicted and fined $100 for breaking the law. Scopes appealed and was ultimately acquitted, though the law banning the teaching of evolution was upheld for decades. The case is seen as a seminal moment in U.S. history and an example of the nation’s perpetual tensions between science and religion. It was fictionalized in a play and later a movie, entitled “Inherit the Wind.”

Eight people read excerpts from Darrow’s defense of Scopes beside the bridge Thursday, with passages including:

• “Here, we find today as brazen and as bold an attempt to destroy learning as was ever made in the Middle Ages.”
• “Ignorance and fanaticism is ever busy and needs feeding. Always it is feeding and gloating for more.”
• “It is impossible, if you leave freedom in the world, to mold the opinions of one man upon the opinions of another. Only tyranny can do it, and your constitutional provision — providing a freedom of religion — was meant to meet that emergency.”

The morning ceremony was followed by a symposium on “book- and idea-banning inschools and libraries across the country” Thursday evening at the Harold Washington Library.

James Connelly poses with Clarence Darrow’s honorary brown sign in front of the Jackson Park bridge named in Darrow’s honor during the annual commemoration of the famed attorney and Hyde Park resident on March 13, 2025. Hubbard Street between State and Clark streets in River North is honorary Clarence S. Darrow Way. Credit: Maxwell Evans/Block Club Chicago

This week’s ceremony drew speeches from local activists, historians, preservationists and politicians in reflection of Darrow’s influence on various social and political causes.

In addition to the Scopes trial, Darrow took on cases involving civil rights — such as his successful 1925 defense of Dr. Ossian Sweet and Sweet’s family and friends, who killed a man while defending themselves from a white mob.

The longtime Hyde Park resident became known as the “attorney for the damned” for his willingness to take on controversial clients, perhaps most famously as he fought the death penalty in the 1924 “Leopold and Loeb” murder case. Darrow also backed labor activists, including his defense of Pullman Strike leader Eugene Debs.

Annual gatherings at the Darrow Bridge are themed around these cases and Darrow’s activism, with past discussions on the rehabilitation of juveniles convicted of crimes, undocumented laborers and ending the death penalty in Illinois.

The ceremonies help keep Darrow alive and highlight the evergreen nature of his causes and passions, attendees said.

“If you don’t tell the stories of those that have [helped] establish how we are in this city, it’s forgotten,” Connelly said. “It’s important that you don’t let the sands of time forget.”

“We have to be bold and brave and courageous,” Democratic state Sen. Robert Peters said Thursday. “We have too many cowards in politics — in D.C., particularly in my own party — and they are failing to protect people.

“We need the spirit of Clarence Darrow every day here in Chicago, in Springfield and in D.C. I wish more folks were rooted in our history and understood it, and lived it, and breathed it.”

An attendee applauds while holding a flower to be thrown in the Columbia Basin in honor of Clarence Darrow during the annual celebration of Darrow at his namesake bridge on March 13, 2025. Attendees used to throw a wreath into the water, but flowers are now thrown to allow everyone to participate, organizers said. Credit: Maxwell Evans/Block Club Chicago

The Darrow Bridge, previously known as the Columbia Bridge, spans the Columbia Basin in Jackson Park.

Built by Burnham and Root in 1880 and renamed for Darrow in 1957, the bridge is one of the park’s oldest features, even predating the 1893 World’s Fair.

Darrow, an agnostic, reportedly said his spirit would return to the bridge on his death date — March 13 — if an afterlife exists. Both he and his second wife, Ruby, had their ashes scattered from the bridge upon their deaths.

Businessman Claude Noble began the tradition of gathering at the bridge in 1940, while the formal commemoration committee was created by Hyde Park historian and author Arthur Weinberg in 1958, according to the Hyde Park Herald. 

Ald. Desmon Yancy (5th) and Hyde Park activist Jack Spicer give updates on the restoration of the Darrow Bridge during the annual ceremony in honor of Clarence Darrow on March 13, 2025. Credit: Maxwell Evans/Block Club Chicago

The bridge was declared unsafe in 2009 and fenced off to pedestrians and cyclists in 2013, according to the Herald. The Chicago Department of Transportation has planned repairs in the years since, which has alternately encouraged and raised concerns among preservationists.

The Darrow Bridge was named this year to Preservation Chicago’s list of “most endangered” buildings, which highlights important local structures threatened by neglect or impending demolition.

Ward Miller, Preservation Chicago’s executive director and a speaker at Thursday’s ceremony, said he wants the city to embark on a “surgical procedure” to keep as much of the original bridge intact as possible while replacing its decayed materials.

The renovation project recently received a boost from Mayor Brandon Johnson’s $830 million borrowing plan for local infrastructure, which narrowly passed City Council last month.

The Obama Foundation, which is building the nearby Obama Presidential Center, also committed this summer to support the bridge’s preservation, Ald. Desmon Yancy (5th) said.

Spokespeople for the transportation department and Obama Foundation could not be immediately reached for comment.

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