A Flat-Earth Preacher’s Understandable Silence about the Scopes Trial
by Glenn Branch
Glenn Branch is deputy director of the National Center for Science Education, a nonprofit organization that defends the integrity of American science education against ideological interference. He is the author of numerous articles on evolution education and climate education, and obstacles to them, in such publications as Scientific American, American Educator, The American Biology Teacher, and the Annual Review of Genomics and Human Genetics, and the co-editor, with Eugenie C. Scott, of Not in Our Classrooms: Why Intelligent Design is Wrong for Our Schools (2006). He received the Evolution Education Award for 2020 from the National Association of Biology Teachers.
In his new book, The Power of the Flat Earth Idea (2026), the historian Edward Guimont notes a small mistake in Edward J. Larson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book about the Scopes trial, Summer for the Gods (1997). There Larson wrote, “Relatively little comment about the trial survives from African Americans. A few black evangelists, such as Virginia’s John Jasper, endorsed Bryan’s position.” Guimont comments, “It would be an impressive feat for Jasper to endorse the attack on evolution twenty-four years after his death—although, as mentioned earlier, modern parishioners of the Sixth Mount Zion Church believe his spirit to haunt it, so Jasper could perhaps provide feedback in that manner.” As it happens, I noticed the same mistake while rereading Summer for the Gods in 2025, although it was news to me that Jasper’s spirit is believed to haunt his old church!
Guimont and I were both ready to detect such a mistake because we’re both interested in the history of flat-earthery, and Jasper was, as it happens, a well-known flat-earther. Indeed, Guimont devotes a chapter of his book to him, entitled “The Unmatched Negro Philosopher”—the title is taken from the subtitle of a 1908 biography. Born a slave in Virginia in 1812, Jasper underwent a religious experience in 1839, leading to his becoming a Baptist minister in the following year, while still enslaved. He was not emancipated until 1865, when Richmond, Virginia, was captured by federal forces. In 1867, he was called to lead the Sixth Mount Zion Church. There, in 1878, he first gave the sermon that made him famous, “The Sun Do Move.” A powerful orator, Jasper would deliver “The Sun Do Move” hundreds of times, often to large audiences, including the Virginia General Assembly, before his death in 1901.
Judging from a printed version published in 1882, “The Sun Do Move” took as its text Exodus 15:3 (“The Lord is a man of war: the Lord is his name” [KJV]), but he turned from the military to the astronomical about halfway through, in the course of a discussion of the book of Joshua. Jasper cited Joshua as proving geocentrism—“the Sun Do Move around the earth”—also citing verses from Malachi, Ecclesiastes, Psalms, Isaiah, and Judges by way of corroboration. He then turned to Revelation 7:1, which refers to the four corners of the earth, arguing, “Now the four angels that stood on the four corners of the earth are an evidence that the earth is squar and not round, for anything that has got four corners is not round, but squar! So we is living on a four-cornered earth sot steady.” (I think that “sot” is a variant past tense form of “set.”) He closed by urging his audience to “stick to the Bible!”
(Parenthetically, printed versions of Jasper’s sermons tend to employ “eye dialect”—“misspellings that are based on standard pronunciations (such as sez for says or kow for cow) but are usually intended to suggest a speaker’s illiteracy or his use of generally nonstandard pronunciations,” per the Encyclopedia Britannica. I quoted from the 1882 version because its use of eye dialect is minimal. A different version, printed in the 1908 biography, renders the discussion of Revelation 7:1 thus: “What do John, und’r de pow’r uv de Spirit, say? He say he saw fo’ anguls standin’ on de fo’ corners uv de earth, holdin’ de fo’ win’s uv de earth, an’ so fo’th.” This is both difficult to read and arguably insulting to Jasper. But I have to admit that I like the challenge that Jasper proceeds to pose in the 1908 biography’s version: “’Low me ter ax ef de earth is roun’, whar do it keep its corners?”)
Guimont offers a possible diagnosis of Larson’s mistake about Jasper, observing, “In March 1925, several months before the Scopes Trial, James S. Hatcher, Reverend of the Third Street Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Richmond, preached a sermon titled ‘The Sun Do Move and the Earth Has Corners,’ a conscious attempt to echo Jasper.” Guimont adds that a contemporary black journalist, Ernest Rice McKinney, reacted to the sermon by explicitly connecting the dots between flat-earthery and antievolutionism, jokingly speculating that “friend Hatcher may have been talking with William Jennings Bryan.” Hatcher and Bryan weren’t in cahoots, of course, but Guimont reports that in the wake of the Scopes trial, Hatcher was asked to preach against evolution in Richmond, concluding that “it does seem that at least in one case, the trial’s outcome led one Flat Earther to Creationism.”
For what it’s worth, I arrived at a different possible diagnosis. Henshaw Ward, a teacher of English turned science popularizer, contributed a piece entitled “Uncle Jasper and Mr. Bryan: Fundamentalism and Absurdity” to The Independent for May 2, 1925. In it, Ward imagines introducing William Jennings Bryan to William E. Hatcher (no discernible relation to the Reverend James S. Hatcher), the author of the 1908 biography of Jasper. “What a funny old darky crotchet it was to preach in these enlightened days that the sun moves,” Bryan exclaims. But Hatcher compares Jasper’s attitude toward the roundness of the earth to Bryan’s attitude toward evolution. “John Jasper was excusable because he was unlettered,” Hatcher charges Bryan. “But what excuse is there for you … to be sixty years behind theological thought and to use this negro’s logic against the scientists?”
On Guimont’s hypothesis, Larson must have read about Hatcher’s flat-earth sermon echoing Jasper’s, learned or inferred that Hatcher was opposed to teaching evolution, and confused the two preachers. On my hypothesis, Larson must have read Ward’s fiction suggesting that Jasper and Bryan agreed in their basic attitude toward the Bible and misremembered it as documenting that Jasper agreed with Bryan in understanding the Bible to be inconsistent with evolution. To be frank, neither seems to me to be tremendously convincing, especially when Hatcher and Ward were not the only writers to have compared Jasper and Bryan. For example, a black newspaper, The New York Age, suggested in 1922 that Jasper “would find himself reinforced today by the weight of such authorities as the Kentucky legislature [which considered a ban on teaching evolution in 1922] and the Hon. William Jennings Bryan.”
Here, in lieu of a decisive diagnosis, is a closing irony. Although Larson wrote, “Relatively little comment about the trial survives from African Americans,” there was more than he recognized. Among the commentators on the Scopes Trial was the great scholar and activist W.E.B. Du Bois. Writing in the NAACP’s magazine The Crisis, of which he was the editor, in September 1925, Du Bois described the situation in Dayton, Tennessee, as “no laughing matter. It is menace and warning. It is a challenge to Religion, Society and Democracy.” A quarter century earlier, Du Bois was the primary organizer of “The Exhibit of American Negroes” for the 1900 Paris Exposition. Included in the exhibit was a collection of a few hundred books written by American blacks. And among them, according to a report in The New York Times about the collection’s visit to Buffalo, New York, in 1901, was John Jasper’s “The Sun Do Move.”
