Clarence S. Darrow Collection

Clarence Seward Darrow, prominent Chicago trial lawyer, was born in Kinsman, Ohio on April 18, 1857. He attended Allegheny College, after which he studied one year at the University of Michigan Law School. He then worked as a lawyer in Youngstown, and was admitted to the Ohio Bar in 1878. He practiced in Ohio for nine years, before moving to Chicago, where he practiced privately before being appointed assistant corporation counsel for the City of Chicago. For four years he served as Chief Counsel. In 1894 Darrow became the counsel for the Chicago and North Western Railway. He left this job, however, after siding with Unionists who called a strike of the American Railway Union. Darrow defended Eugene V. Debs on a charge of contempt of a federal injunction, and although he lost the case, he went on to become one of the nation’s leading labor advocates. In 1907 he secured the acquittal of labor leader Bill Haywood for the murder of former Idaho Governor Frank Steuneberg.

Darrow defended many others accused of murder, including Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb in 1924 for the murder of Bobby Franks. In 1925 he defended John Scopes in a case involving the teaching of evolution and the constitutionality of a Tennessee anti-evolution statute. Darrow’s opposition in that case was great trial lawyer William Jennings Bryan.

Darrow had a long affiliation with the Woodlawn neighborhood, residing at 1537 E. 60th Street for a large portion of his adult life. When he died on March 13, 1938, at the age of eighty, his ashes were scattered into the waters of the Jackson Park Lagoon.