Witness to the Truth by John H. Scott & Cleo Scott Brown tells the extraordinary life story of a grassroots human rights leader and his courageous campaign to win voting rights for African Americans in northeast Louisiana, one of the last places in the south to allow African Americans the right to vote. Born in 1901, John H. Scott grew up in an almost all-black parish where black businesses, schools, and neighborhoods thrived in isolation from the white community. The settlement appeared self-sufficient, but all was not as it seemed. From Reconstruction until the 1960s, not one African-American was allowed to vote. This small-town, almost unknown minister and farmer, proceeded to redress this inequality. Ultimately convincing Attorney General Robert Kennedy to participate in his crusade, Scott led a twenty-five year struggle that graphically illustrates how persistent efforts by local citizens translated into a national movement and how ordinary people did and can impact a country.

Told in Scott's own words, and recorded by his daughter Cleo Brown, Witness to the Truth recounts the complex tyranny of southern race relations. Raised by grandparents who lived during slavery, Scott grew up learning about the horrors of that institution, and he himself experienced the injustices of Jim Crow laws. Without bitterness or anger, he chronicles almost one hundred years of life in the rural south, including his grandparents’ recollections of slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction, and his own recollections of migrations between the two World Wars, the displacement of African American farmers during the New Deal, and the shocking methods white southerners used to keep African Americans under economic domination and away from the polls. Chapter president of the NAACP for more than 30 years and a recipient of the A. P. Tureaud Citizens Award, Scott embodied the persistence, strength, and raw courage required of African American leaders in the rural South, particularly in the 1950s and 1960s.

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