River Reads

The River Reads program is a reading program for adults. The selection this year is Witness to the Truth by John H. Scott with Cleo Scott Brown.

Witness to the Truth 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 unknown Lake Providence minister and farmer proceeded to redress this inequality. Scott lead a twenty-five year struggle that graphically illustrates how persistent efforts by local citizens traslated into a national movement and how ordinary people did and can impact a country.

Told in Scott's words as recorded by his daughter Cleo Brown, Witness to the Truth, explores the complexities of Southern race relations. 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 the displacement of African American farmers during the New Deal, and the shocking methods some white southerners used to keep African Americans under economic domination and away from the polls. Scott embodied the persistence, strength, and raw courage required of African American leaders in the rural South, particularly in the 1950s and 1960s.

River Reads begins in May 2008.

• Adult Programs
• Young Adult Programs
• Children's Programs

If you have any questions or comments, email us at River Reads

back to top