Witness to the Truth: My Struggle for Human Rights in Louisiana.

Witness to the Truth: My Struggle for Human Rights in Louisiana. By John H. Scott with Cleo Scott Brown. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, c. 2003. Pp. xxii, 289. $29.95, ISBN 1-57003-489-3.)

Based on personal interviews conducted in the 1960s by the late Joseph Logsdon, this book chronicles the life of intrepid civil rights activist and Baptist minister John Henry Scott. Born in 1901 in the predominantly black Delta cotton parish of East Carroll in Louisiana, Scott began his civil rights battles in the 1930s. Over the course of the next three decades, he persevered to finally achieve nearly 90 percent black voter registration in his home parish. Witness to the Truth, compiled by Scott's daughter, Cleo Scott Brown, is an inspirational story that can benefit casual readers, although scholars will probably be less than satisfied.

John Henry Scott credits his grandfather, a former cook for a Confederate captain and later a Union soldier, for providing him with "a picture of the kind of man I wanted to become" (p. 15). In the 1920s militant black newspapers broadened Scott's knowledge of black life and protest in the United States. He recalls that the Chicago Defender in particular "kindled the fire of freedom in my soul" (p. 65). In 1938 Scott organized a local branch of the NAACP to protest the Farm Security Administration's decision to remove African Americans from fertile land to a much poorer area. Scott lost that battle but in 1946 began his drive for black voting in East Carroll that culminated in numerous legal suits against the local voting registrar. His testimony before the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights in New Orleans in 1960 led to local white hostility that ended in his being wounded by gunfire. After the Voting Rights Act of 1965, federal registrars arrived in East Carroll Parish, and Scott finally won his long and costly civil rights struggle.

Witness to the Truth is a fascinating story. Scott's recollections of day-today life and black and white relationships in the Delta are of particular interest. But there are problems. Because there are no notes the reader is left to depend solely on Scott's account of events, and because the book is drawn almost entirely from one source--the Logsdon interviews--it lacks historical context, a major weakness that limits its utility for scholars. Also, there is no index, and John Henry Scott's rural speech pattern has been standardized, an editorial decision that undermines the subject's authenticity.

More problematic are instances of selective editing that have made the book's title something of a misnomer. In Witness to the Truth, John Henry Scott notes that he continued to hunt and fish as usual when his grandparents' deaths left Scott and his sister to manage their farm alone. Then, without explanation, Scott describes a stern warning he received from a plantation boss. Yet, in the original Logsdon interview, Scott indicated what led to the warning, explaining that he had been caught hunting on posted property for a third time after two previous admonitions (John Henry Scott, interview by Joseph Logsdon, 1967, p. 30, John Henry Scott Papers, Louisiana and Special Collections, Earl K. Long Library, University of New Orleans, New Orleans, La.). In another instance Logsdon asked Scott about the activities in East Carroll Parish of young civil rights workers from the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). Scott responded with a negative opinion of the CORE activists who, he felt, did not understand local conditions. Scott also became infuriated with CORE when they tried to order him about (Scott interview, pp. 1-3). In Witness to the Truth, however, Scott's opinion of CORE has been omitted, perhaps out of fear that inclusion of the material, like that referencing his illegal hunting, would somehow diminish his stature.

In the hands of a professional historian Witness to the Truth could have made a substantive historiographical contribution. A more thorough study might, for instance, have included a contemporary portrait of East Carroll Parish. As it stands, Witness to the Truth is a less than complete, and in some ways a less than authentic, presentation of a courageous black civil rights activist whose religious faith gave him the strength to succeed against overwhelming odds.

PHILLIP J. JOHNSON

New Orleans, Louisiana