Absolute Truth Will Set Us Free

For many American families, the most overt displays of racism have happened in far-too-recent history. One educator has uncovered dark ties to a pivotal miscarriage of justice-and she wants the world to know.

When DruAnne Carpenter Earll received an unexpected phone call from a journalist, her family history was thrown into a new-and tragic-light. In 1939, W.D. Lyons was accused of three heinous murders. A Black sharecropper, he was arrested, beaten by the police, and forced to confess to a brutal killing and arson.

A 29 year old, young lawyer from New York's NAACP and eventual Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall defended Lyons. He was given parole in 1961 and pardoned four years later. The case was a landmark in American history and an important step on the slow march toward equal justice that continues today. But Carpenter Earll never knew her family's dark connection to the story: that it was her own grandfather who had been accused of participating in the killings and framing of Lyons.

An educator with two advanced degrees, Carpenter Earll is no stranger to teaching the tough lessons of history. Bringing her own considerable writing gifts to bear, she puts her pen to this gripping retelling. Absolute Truth Will Set Us Free! is a powerful exposure of injustice. This book is a can't-miss for students of history, advocates of equity, and those society has left behind.

DruAnne Carpenter Earll was born in Westwood, California, and hold both a graduate and a postgraduate degree in education. She grew up raising Scottish Highlanders in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, where she came to know scorpions, horny toads, and rattlesnakes. As a gay woman with Asperger's Syndrome, she is passionate about reaching neurodivergent people, the LGBTQ+ community, and anyone else who feels marginalized by society. With a fruitful life spent on both U.S. coasts and almost everywhere in between, DruAnne plays twelve-string guitar, sings, fishes, and paints. She considers herself hysterically funny and promises to never grow up.