THE TRUE STORY OF
ED SCOTT, JR. (1922-2015)
& HIS FAMILY
“My motto is don’t stop chasing your dream.
And that was my dream.
To grow these catfish.
Which I did.”
- Ed Scott, Jr.
Ed Scott was a trailblazing Mississippi farmer and the first non-white owner and operator of a catfish plant in the nation. He battled long odds and institutionalized racism to carve out of the Mississippi Delta land an agricultural empire of black self-determination, which flowed out to and benefited his surrounding community.
Along the way he ducked Nazi sniper fire in a ditch with General Patton in World War II, marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge at Selma, gave farming advice to civil rights leader Fannie Lou Hamer, and battled for justice against the leviathan United States government.
Winner
2019 Nonfiction Award,
Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters
"Mr. Ed Scott is a hero our country
needs to learn about, and this portrait of him is strong and beautifully written. His situation and his fate are central to the American experiment. I cannot recommend Mr. Rankin’s storytelling too highly.
It is a powerful thing.
We owe him a debt.”
— Randall Kenan
author of The Fire This Time
SOUTHERN FOODWAYS ALLIANCE
STUDIES IN CULTURE, PEOPLE, AND PLACE
Short-listed
2019 James Beard Book Awards, James Beard Foundation