Just a little history: William Louis Poteat: Scientist, Baptist Evangelical and Evolutionist

By Ed Morris
(Ed Morris, the retiring director of the Wake Forest Historical Museum, says he wrote this for The Wake Weekly and the Wake Forest College Birthplace Society’s newsletter in January of 2009, the year of the town’s centennial.)
Today Wake Forest University is a nationally known university with a reputation for its many achievements in science, medicine, business, law and; this week I would be amiss, not to mention the number one basketball team in America. However, in its 175-year history it first entered the national spotlight in the 1920s.
Dr. Charles E. Taylor had served admirably as its sixth president and oversaw the establishment of the law school and the school of medicine; however, Taylor was very much a man of the nineteenth century. The first Wake Forest president of the twentieth century was Taylor’s successor Dr. William Louis Poteat (1905-1927), who would serve though some of the college’s most controversial years.
William Louis Poteat, known by all as “Dr. Billy,” was born in Caswell County, North Carolina in 1856. He was born into a life of privilege, the son of the county’s wealthiest planter and slave holder. He was raised in a very nurturing yet strict Baptist family.
His father James Poteat was a leader in both the local church, the regional Baptist association and the State Baptist Convention. It was also a family in which education and free thinking were greatly encouraged. His faith and upbringing would both bring him through and cause him great agony in his years at the helm of North Carolina’s flagship Baptist institution.
The 1920s were critical times in America; the nation was still recovering from the effects of World War I and the country was in the midst of prohibition. For American colleges and universities, academic and intellectual freedom were not only threatened but under attack by religious zealots who feared the advancement of science and scientific research as damaging to Christianity as they knew it.
Chief among those perceived threats was the idea of evolution. In the summer of 1925 one of the most famous court cases in American history played out in Tennessee. That summer former presidential candidate and anti-evolutionist, William Jennings Bryan, and famed attorney Clarence Darrow battled in court over a Tennessee school teacher, John Scopes, charged with teaching evolution as a scientific theory.
Poteat was more than just an interested bystander; he had long been the champion among the intellectual community nationally as the leader of the evolution movement. To understand how the president of a small, southern, conservative, Baptist college and a well-known Baptist theologian could find himself in the center of this whirlwind controversy is an amazing story.
William Louis Poteat came to Wake Forest College as a student at the age of sixteen in 1873. He graduated near the top of his class in 1877 and the following year was hired as a tutor to incoming students.
In 1880 he was hired as an assistant professor of biology. He found himself teaching a subject that he was not particularly equipped to teach. He plunged himself into self-study in the subject.
In 1883 he spent the summer studying biology and zoology in Massachusetts and later in Germany. It became clear to Poteat that to fully understand science you must explore and research the subject for oneself. He purchased and brought back to Wake Forest a microscope.
The next semester he taught zoology, mineralogy and geology. In his zoology classes he had students perform dissections and make use of his compound microscope. He took students to the State Fair and to the circus to observe animals and genetic abnormalities. In his mineralogy and geology classes he required his students to do field study and use the compound microscope.
Today this is a method of learning found in every middle school in the country; however, in the mid-1880s this was revolutionary and trailblazing. Wake Forest became the first college in the south and one of the first in the nation to embrace laboratory study in the teaching of the sciences.
Lea Laboratory was built under Poteat’s guiding hand as the very first and only college building in a southern college exclusively for the study of the sciences. The eyes of the academic world for a short time turned to Dr. Poteat and his teaching methods.
In his personal reading and study of scientific thought of the day Poteat began to struggle with questions between his strong and abiding faith and science. Unlike most scientists of the day, Poteat turned to the scriptures for answers.
It became clear to him that scientific advancement, especially evolution, was not in conflict with the Bible but was “God at work in nature.” This was the message Poteat would again and again take to his critics to ward off attacks on academic freedom and scientific study and upon him personally when he took the office of President of Wake Forest College.
Time after time Dr. Poteat would give eloquent sermons before Baptist gatherings and at northern universities quoting scripture as his basis for defending the theory of evolution and never once attacking his critics. He did so with such affirmation of his personal faith that for them to attack his words would be contradictory to their own Biblical argument.
From 1922 to 1925 state after state, primarily in the south, passed what was commonly know as “monkey laws” prohibiting the teaching of evolution in public schools and universities.
In 1923 William Jennings Bryan, the champion of the anti-evolution movement, came to Raleigh to give an impassioned speech urging North Carolina’s Christian taxpayers to drive evolutionists from North Carolina schools. Although never mentioned in Bryan’s speech, his appearance here was certainly aimed at Poteat.
Later that year North Carolina attempted the passage of its version of the “monkey law.” Poteat worked quietly behind the scenes letting the president of the University of North Carolina become the spokesperson.
The bill failed with a vote of 67 to 46. Twenty-one of Poteat’s former Wake Forest students held seats in the General Assembly, and of those voting, eighteen stood with their former professor and voted “NO.” One of the most conservative and religious southern states voted down the bill to outlaw the teaching of evolution.
Poteat nationally rose to the status of hero for academic freedom in America; however, his critics among North Carolina’s conservative Baptists would make one last attempt to remove him from office. Once again his impassioned use of scripture would serve to stave off one final attack.
Two years later, in 1925, Dr. Poteat would retire from the presidency of Wake Forest College and return to his biology classroom where he taught until his death in 1938.
Upon his resignation he summed up his reason for not giving in to his critics. Poteat in his farewell address stated, “…that any group of men should undertake to settle a scientific fact by majority vote in any assembly is a travesty on the intelligence of our race and we ought not to stand for it.”
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