Rachel Brown, the 22-year-old daughter of Reverend Jeremiah Brown, is a "pretty, but not beautiful" girl. She is a kind and gentle person who dislikes controversy. Rachel is a second-grade schoolteacher and close friend of Bert Cates. She is a purely fictitious character created by Lawrence and Lee. She has no counterpart in the Scopes trial.
Rachel is a dynamic character, a character that is transformed by her experiences and actions. The audience is first introduced to Rachel as she visits Cates in jail. She is nervous and unsure of herself because she has never been to the jail before and because she knows that her father would disapprove of her visiting Cates. Rachel meets Cates and tries to persuade him to admit that he was wrong to teach evolution to his students. She wants him to be on the "right side of things," the side her father is on, the side of fundamentalism.
Rachel's father, a zealous fundamentalist preacher, raised her, and she learned at a young age to fear her father and any thoughts she ever had that deviated from fundamentalism. For Rachel, it had always been " . . . safer not to think at all." She is confused because she loves Cates who believes in academic freedom, yet academic freedom (freedom of thought) is in opposition to her fundamentalist beliefs (a strict interpretation of the Bible).
