Emmett J. Scott: Power Broker of the Tuskegee Machine

By Maceo C. Dailey Jr., David Levering Lewis and Elaine Brown

Reared in Houston (Freedmen’s Town), Texas, Emmett J. Scott was a journalist, newspaper editor, government official, author, and chief of staff, adviser, and ghostwriter to Booker T. Washington. Called “the power broker of the Tuskegee Machine,” Scott was a Renaissance man, scholar, and political fixer. However, his life has not received a full examination until now.

Built upon fifty years of research, Maceo C. Dailey’s Emmett J. Scott offers fascinating detail by describing Scott’s role in promoting the Tuskegee Institute. Before his 2015 death, Dailey had nearly singular access to the Scott papers at Morgan State University, which have been officially closed for decades. Readers will finally be exposed to Scott’s behind-the-scenes contributions to racial uplift and will see his influential role in advancing not only the Tuskegee Institute but also the Booker T. Washington agenda.

Editors Will Guzmán and David H. Jackson Jr. lend their own expertise in bringing Dailey’s lifetime project to fruition. Two-time Pulitzer Prize–winning historian David Levering Lewis, a close friend of Dailey’s, provides a timely foreword. Former Black Panther Party chairwoman Elaine Brown, Scott’s granddaughter, reflects on his impact and her relationship with the Scott family in the afterword.

Taken together, this work of biography is an impressive reference and an essential endeavor of recovery, one that restores to prominence the life and legacy of Emmett J. Scott.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Texas Tech University Press
• Release date: May 30, 2023
• ISBN: 9781682831304

Maceo C. Dailey Jr.

Maceo C. Dailey Jr. (1943–2015) was an award-winning historian whose essays have been published in Freedomways, Langston Hughes Review, Review of Black Political Economy, Harvard Business History Review, Atlanta History: A Journal of Georgia and the South, and Dígame! He co-edited/authored African Americans in El Paso (2014), When the Saints Go Hobbling In: Emmett Jay Scott and the Booker T. Washington Movement (2013), Tuneful Tales (2002), and Wheresoever My People Chance to Dwell: Oral Interviews with African American Women of El Paso (2000).

Book preview

9781682831236_FC.jpg

Will Guzmán,

KIMBERLY D. HILL, WILLIAM T. HOSTON, Series editors

Emmett J.

Scott

Power Broker of

the Tuskegee

Machine

Maceo C. Dailey Jr.

Edited by Will Guzmán

and David H. Jackson Jr.

Texas Tech University Press

Copyright © 2023 by Texas Tech University Press

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, including electronic storage and retrieval systems, except by explicit prior written permission of the publisher. Brief passages excerpted for review and critical purposes are excepted.

This book is typeset in EB Garamond. The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R1997). ♾

Designed by Hannah Gaskamp

Cover design by Hannah Gaskamp

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Dailey, Maceo Crenshaw, Jr., author. Title: Emmett J. Scott: Power Broker of the Tuskegee Machine / Maceo C. Dailey Jr; edited by Will Guzmán and David H. Jackson Jr.

Description: Lubbock, Texas: Texas Tech University Press, [2023] | Series: Afro-Texans | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2022006309 (print) | LCCN 2022006308 (ebook) |

ISBN 978-1-68283-123-6 (cloth) | ISBN 978-1-68283-130-4 (ebook) |

ISBN 978-1-68283-130-4q (ebook) | ISBN 978-1-68283-123-6q (cloth)

Subjects: LCSH: Scott, Emmett J. (Emmett Jay), 1873–1957. | African American educators—Texas—Biography. | Tuskegee Institute—History. | African American political consultants—United States—Biography. | African American journalists—United States—Biography.

Classification: LCC LA2317.S95 D35 2023 (ebook) | LCC LA2317.S95 (print) |

DDC 370.92 [B 23’eng’20220]—dc10

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022006309

Printed in the United States of America

23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 / 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Texas Tech University Press

Box 41037

Lubbock, Texas 79409-1037 USA

800.832.4042

[e-mail]

www.ttupress.org

Contents

Timeline

Foreword

Editors’ Note

Introduction

Chapter 1: Get Together Scott

Chapter 2: Tuskegee Secretary of State

Chapter 3: The Promise of Politics

Chapter 4: A Losing Political Battle

Chapter 5: Business Advocate

Chapter 6: International Endeavors

Chapter 7: Fighting Jim Crow

Chapter 8: The Changing of the Guard

Chapter 9: The Business of Politics

Chapter 10: New Business Ventures

Chapter 11: Polemics, Propaganda, and Old-Fashioned Hagiography

Acknowledgments

Afterword

Abbreviations

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Timeline

1873: Scott is born in Houston, living in the Fourth Ward’s Freedmen’s Town

1887: Graduates from Colored High School, Houston, Texas

1887: Attends Wiley College, Marshall, Texas

1890: Stops attending Wiley College

1891: Employed at Houston Daily Post

1893: Co-founder, Texas Freeman

1894: Editor, Texas Freeman

1894: Personal secretary to Norris Wright Cuney

1897: Marries Eleanora J. Baker of Galveston, Texas

1897: Organizes BTW Houston and Prairie View A&M University visits

1897: Personal secretary to Booker T. Washington

1900: Helps establish the National Negro Business League

1901: Awarded honorary Master of Arts, Wiley College

1902: Secretary, National Negro Business League

1905: Editor, with Booker T. Washington, Tuskegee and Its People

1909: Member, American Commission to Liberia, US President William H. Taft

1912: Secretary, Tuskegee Institute

1912: Secretary, International Conference on the Negro

1915: Death of Booker T. Washington

1916: Author, Booker T. Washington: Builder of a Civilization, with Lyman Beecher Stowe

1917: Special Adviser of Black Affairs, US Secretary of War Newton Baker

1918: Awarded honorary Doctor of Laws (LLD), Wiley College and Wilberforce University

1919: Author, Scott’s Official History of the American Negro in the World War

1919: Appointed Howard University secretary-treasurer and business manager

1920: Author, Negro Migration During the War

1957: Scott dies in Washington, DC

Foreword

Of the early shaping years in Houston, Texas, Maceo Crenshaw Dailey Jr. keenly describes his ambitious, nattily attired subject with the distinctive pince-nez as grounded in the ethos of Black progress . . . and possessed [of] a compass that charted a course from powerlessness to powerful. One reads this judicious, comprehensive, eminently readable biography of Emmett Jay Scott with incredulity, professional gratitude, and, pace , epistemic humility. Scott was one of the twentieth century’s most influential American men of color, a historic figure whose derived political and institutional power was for a time almost matchless and would have become actual but for an occasion’s racial tone-deafness . In Emmett J. Scott: Power Broker of the Tuskegee Machine we learn that his previously unerring power compass fatefully misled Scott to speak with unwonted racial assertiveness before Theodore Roosevelt, Julius Rosenwald, and other Tuskegee trustees assembled but months after Dr. Washington’s November 1915 demise to select his successor.

Straightforwardly stated: this deeply researched, serially interrupted, yet-to-be completed life and times of Emmett Scott—Booker T. Washington’s consigliere; Secretary of War Newton Baker’s problematic adviser and author of Scott’s Official History of the American Negro in the World War; secretary of the National Negro Business League; Howard University’s permanent secretary-treasurer; assistant publicity director of the Republican National Committee, 1928–1948; and controversial director of employment of the Pennsylvania Pews’ Sun Shipyard No. 4—was fated to become a much regretted although fading memory after Professor Maceo Crenshaw Dailey Jr.’s unexpected death at the still vital age of seventy-two.¹ Those of us who remembered the early interpretive promise of his Neither ‘Uncle Tom’ nor ‘Accommodationist’: Booker T. Washington, Emmett Jay Scott and ‘Constructionalism’ in Atlanta History (1995) and had profited repeatedly in our own urgent writings from Dailey’s cornucopia interviews and nuanced insights about historic African American leadership collusion and conflicts were oppressed by the irreplaceable void we foresaw in civil rights scholarship.

Will Guzmán’s August 15, 2018, letter of interest, therefore, seemed nothing less than providential. Professor Guzmán of Prairie View A&M University’s history department, a friend of the deceased and aware of my eulogy regretfully read in absentia at our mutual friend’s Baltimore memorial service, wrote that the Emmett Scott monograph was in his safekeeping, and that Texas Tech University Press wants a scholar to edit it (it is nearly 800 pages and the endnotes are incomplete) so they can publish. Professor Guzmán had approached the Dailey family, volunteered his services gratis as editor, but had heard nothing. My fear is that Maceo’s last and most important work will never be published on Scott’s life, he warned. Responding immediately to Guzmán’s once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, I pledged to contact Maceo’s oldest son, whom I recalled fondly as the teenaged companion of one of my sons, in hopes of prompting, I wrote, the family’s serious consideration of the fulfillment of my [erstwhile] student, friend, and colleague Maceo’s legacy. I pray attention will be paid.²

Fifty years ago, Maceo was my first graduate student, and I was at the beginning of my career as a newly minted history PhD at Morgan State College in Baltimore, Maryland. In more than a half-century of mentoring graduate students, Maceo stands out for his intellectual originality. Fast forward more than a few years, and we, he and I, were fathers whose wives and children were like a blended family in those Washington, DC, and Mt. Holyoke times. Significantly, we also blended our scholarship. Maceo shared his research from his planned Emmett Scott biography, an invaluable service when I wrote the first volume of my Du Bois biography.

Professor Dailey’s engaged scholarship has wrought a posthumous biographical tapestry in which his meticulous weavings and more contemporaneous bibliography update, complement, and deftly extend the original historian-biographer’s loom of revelations and interpretations. Among these several are two for me: the one a confirmation of a conviction, the other a discovery. The University of Chicago sociologist Robert E. Park’s major role in publicizing the work and philosophy of Booker Washington has long been known, yet Dailey’s ongoing, almost diurnal record of Emmett Scott’s seamless machinations, calculating diplomacy, and indispensable intermediateness further diminish, for me, accomplishments attributed to Booker Washington. Scott’s role in persuading Julius Rosenwald to join the ultimately doomed salvage operation of the behemoth Atlanta business empire of fellow Texan Heman Perry was, for me, an interesting, significant discovery.

For our nation, exclusion has been what malaria was to the continent of Africa is the striking opinion shared by Maceo upon completion of his extraordinary contribution. Economists speculate that Africa could have been fantastically wealthy had it not had malaria, he continued. One might speculate that America would now be fantastically wealthy had it not practiced racial exclusion. To be sure, the record of our history is now far richer with the inclusion of the life and times of Emmett Jay Scott.

david levering lewis

Julius Silver University Professor and Professor of History Emeritus, NYU

Two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Biography

September 9, 2020

Editors’ Note

This Emmett J. Scott biography is over forty-five years in the making and is a striking testament to the persistence of author Maceo Crenshaw Dailey Jr. Passing away in October 2015, Dailey left the Scott manuscript he began researching in 1975 unfinished. It continued to languish for years before co-editor Will Guzmán embraced the idea of completing it with the help of Booker T. Washington scholar David H. J ackson Jr.

Both Guzmán and Jackson had met Dailey decades before. Realizing that he would have a wealth of knowledge on the subject, Jackson sought out Dailey when he began his dissertation research on Charles Banks, a prominent Mississippi businessman and best friend of Emmett J. Scott. Dailey would go on to serve as a reviewer for Jackson’s biography on Banks and later provided a blurb for Jackson’s book on Booker T. Washington. Jackson also introduced Guzmán to Dailey during a fall 1999 Florida A&M University visit when he invited the latter for a lecture. Guzmán would go on to enroll as a doctoral student at the University of Texas at El Paso, becoming Dailey’s first doctoral student.

As editors, we were forewarned by various academics not to engage in such a project since finishing a historian’s tome is a thankless task and nearly impossible, realizing little reward and incurring all blame. We ignored this professional advice and instead began the complicated journey to recover and resurrect Dailey’s magnum opus largely due to the personal connection we had and the need to bring this story to a wider audience. Specialists of the Black experience will be better off for Dailey’s fortitude and study.

Prominent historian Rayford W. Logan described Scott as suave and as using compromise as an art of achieving the possible.⁵⁹ Indeed, Scott was an extraordinary figure whose contributions have been obscured, despite his living an exceptionally prolonged life and being an instrumental cog in the Tuskegee Machine. We hope that this publication will spawn writers to consider Emmett in their assessment of Booker T. Washington since the two were closely linked for over eighteen years—as, Maceo states, one of the most remarkable, powerful African American leadership duos in US history. While Washington stood in the limelight as leader, Scott served as Tuskegee’s secretary of state. Dailey argues that Washington came to rely on and many times defer to the genius of Scott in dealing with Tuskegee opposition. The Tuskegee leader described Emmett as someone exceedingly rare, only once or twice in a lifetime are such people discovered, and in the 1901 edition of Up from Slavery, he wrote: I owe more to his tact, wisdom and hard work than I can describe.

This publication is also significant since Dailey began writing when the Emmett Jay Scott Papers at Morgan State University were accessible. However, they have been publicly closed for decades and thus no other historian, apart from Dr. Dailey, has extensively mined the voluminous records. For such a towering and well-connected figure, readers will learn much more, not only on the amazing Scott life, but also about the inner workings of the Tuskegee Machine.

Dailey attempted to have this massive Scott account published on several occasions. According to an essay he wrote in 1999, he submitted the document to the University of North Carolina Press (UNCP) in the 1980s and secured a positive internal appraisal. I received telephone information and confirmation that the press’s in-house review had produced an extremely favorable assessment and that the manuscript would be forwarded to only one reader for comments and criticisms, he recalled. However, it appears that he placed too much confidence in the in-house review and erroneously assumed that the external review process would be perfunctory since he had obtained evidence of several statements vouching for the quality of the manuscript and the importance of it for publication. To Dailey’s chagrin, when the draft went out for anonymous review, it did not garner a favorable evaluation, and ultimately UNCP rejected it. According to Dr. Dailey, the follow-up was a resounding no, and the news devastated him. For reasons that are not entirely clear to us, Dailey believed that someone too powerful to offend had conspired to sabotage him and prevent his Emmett Scott research from being published. The news became so disheartening for Dr. Dailey that he struggled with having this work printed from then on. Certainly, it was so large and unwieldly that he reflected on the subject as being a Bothersome Biography.⁶⁰

Having been close to this project for so long, Dailey likely did not see many of the limitations and challenges within it. Generally, dissertations are not ready to go directly to press since they require additional authorial revisions. Not fully understanding this, at least at the time he received the denial from UNC Press, contributed to the author’s dismay. Therefore, the readers should be aware that the current version is not an overview of Scott’s entire life as covered in Dailey’s Howard University dissertation. In order to keep within the prescribed Texas Tech University Press word limit, we thought it best to separate this work into two volumes, with the first covering Scott’s early life until he left Tuskegee Institute for Washington, DC, after Washington’s death and during World War I.

One of the difficulties in editing this lengthy uncompleted manuscript was the multiple issues with securing and corroborating materials that were not sufficiently cited. However, we did our level best to align the sources with the paragraphs in all instances that were possible. Still, we could not confirm all the notes despite our determined efforts and did not locate references to support certain substantive information that Dr. Dailey provided at various points throughout the book. We initially encountered a work that was well thought out but disjointed in countless areas that made it onerous to follow; therefore, we reorganized major portions of the text for reading ease and flow.

In addition, there were some topics that concerned us regarding Dailey’s analysis—largely shaped when he wrote his dissertation—of the recorded historical events and interpretation that did not conform to conventional thoughts on the same subject. In those cases, especially where new scholarship contradicts his viewpoint, we have tried to add comments in the endnotes explicating those facts without altering his thoughts.

Will Guzmán,

North Carolina Central University

David H. Jackson Jr.,

North Carolina Central University

January 2023

Emmett J.

Scott

Introduction

On an important political mission in 1903, the young private secretary Emmett Jay Scott wrote to his boss, the Wizard of Tuskegee Booker T. Washington, It has been a delicate matter to put pressure on this man and hold it there and yet seek to be as considerate of his feelings as possible. . . . It is a pity that you have been betrayed. ¹ Scott’s loyalty to Washington and fidelity to purpose made it possible for him to handle the delicate matter pertaining to leadership and power, but still with some concern for the individual. Over the course of time and with an acute sense of mission, Scott came to handle such matters routinely wh en needed.

Get Together Scott, as he was known in the late nineteenth century in Houston, Texas, had made his mark early on in the African American community and region as a newspaper founder and private secretary to Galveston’s Norris Wright Cuney, one of the most powerful Black politicians of that era.² The urbane Scott would go on to become private secretary to Tuskegee Institute principal Booker T. Washington, who enjoyed national recognition as an educator and political leader. Scott possessed a Hamiltonian sophistication and cosmopolitan outlook to Washington’s movement. He brought something else even more valuable, according to his sister—his bag of tricks [meaning stealth] to Tuskegee—to sustain Dr. Washington in his power quest and implementation of his ideology.

Brilliantly, Scott oversaw, oiled, and ran the Tuskegee Machine—a controlling network of influence that made Booker Taliaferro Washington a colossus in the Black community and the go-between to white America. In some quarters, Scott was perceived as the Brains of the Tuskegee Machine.¹ As Washington’s alter ego, Scott stood gallantly beside the Tuskegee leader to obtain and consolidate power, implement their plans, and deal deftly with detractors. Few Black leaders have been blessed with such a sophisticated loyalist and second-in-command as Scott, and he and Washington complemented each other almost to near perfection.

As Black men and leaders in a racist society, Scott and Washington had to address the many complications related to the acquisition and use of Black power for the uplift of African Americans. Secrecy was a significant means by which they enjoyed success. They essentially acted as diplomats for the Black community seeking a modus vivendi, however temporary and perhaps not too flawed, to make it possible for Blacks to stabilize, survive, and, hopefully, strive. Washington and Scott laid a foundation for African American economic, political, and sociocultural uplift within the then–halfway house of US democracy, and they built shrewdly on that foundation until Booker’s death in 1915.

Having served as Washington’s private secretary for eighteen years (1897–1915) and secretary to Tuskegee Institute for three years, Scott had superlative knowledge and command of the accomplishments and intricacies of the Booker T. Washington movement. Although he seemed the natural choice to succeed Washington as principal of Tuskegee, inheritor of the political power and fame that came from activities in the Black community, and ties to prominent US presidents Theodore Roosevelt and William H. Taft and philanthropists Andrew Carnegie and Julius Rosenwald, Scott was not selected.

Appointed two years later as Special Assistant on Negro Affairs to Secretary of War Newton Baker during World War I, however, Scott positioned himself to leave Tuskegee, an institution undergoing change under new leadership. Scott reached the pinnacle of his power in the mid-1920s following his appointment as secretary-treasurer and business manager of Howard University, the so-called Capstone of Negro Education.² He engineered the election of the university’s first full-time African American president, secured passage of a congressional bill for annual funding of Howard, and engaged in innumerable political and economic projects for individual and collective Black uplift. Many of his activities at the premier HBCU (historically Black colleges and universities) seemed a contradiction for the man formerly entrenched in the movement of Booker T. Washington upon whom so much venom—most notably the opprobrium of Uncle Tom—had been heaped by detractors.³ Tuskegee Institute, to some, was a lowly trade school, and B. T. Washington’s most challenging critics, like his nemesis, the scholar W. E. B. Du Bois and his followers, deemed him misguided and maybe all too opportunistic.

Scott himself came in for considerable criticism while serving as secretary to Washington, and in the aftermath of the Tuskegee principal’s death. Alain Locke, the first African American Rhodes Scholar, proclaimed Scott a crook if ever there was one.⁴ Dr. Carter G. Woodson, the so-called Father of Negro History, addressed the matter of Scott’s secretive, behind-the-scenes activities by commenting that Scott was the only man who could walk on snow without leaving footprints.⁵ Howard University distinguished English professor Arthur P. Davis wistfully referred to Scott as a Smooth Egg.⁶ Whether caustic or clever, the observations reveal decided sides of the mysteries and marvels of Scott’s leadership style in serving as Booker’s emissary and his activities subsequent to his tenure at Tuskegee.

In dealing with the obstacles and opportunities of Black life, Scott touched upon practically every aspect of uplift. He can be found—in addition to his activities at the highest level of politics and education—promoting or leading the charge in behavior recognizable in so many present-day African American advancement efforts: entrepreneurship, moviemaking, publishing, athletics, and inventions. Scott’s leading role in the 1900 establishment of the National Negro Business League (NNBL) in Boston; injecting himself into the debates surrounding pugilists Jack Johnson and later Joe Louis; publishing four important books and myriad essays and newspaper articles; investing in the early automotive industry, a curtainless shower concept, and George Washington Carver’s paint and dye projects; and bringing to fruition the movie The Birth of a Race as a foil to D. W. Griffith’s virulently racist film The Birth of a Nation are but a few of his many diverse accomplishments and endeavors. He did all of this while holding down executive positions—at Tuskegee Institute and Howard University—that would have taxed the ordinary individual.

Scott simultaneously maintained a family (wife and five children, all of whom emerged as well-educated and accomplished adults), found time for a mistress in Alice Ruth Moore Dunbar-Nelson (former wife of poet Paul Laurence Dunbar), and had a granddaughter fathered outside of wedlock, Elaine Brown, who would emerge in 1974 as head of the Black Panther Party and author of the brilliant A Taste for Power.⁷ She could not have said it better for her grandfather, to whom she bears a remarkable resemblance, but his vocation was vastly different and, arguably, more focused in his taste and acquisition of power based on prescience and perseverance as he rose from private secretary to power broker.

The Booker T. Washington movement, of which Scott was a major contributor and which he continued to lead after Washington’s death, still looms as largely a conundrum to the Black community. Recent studies, however, have revealed the extent to which this movement reflected an astonishingly correct vision for the times and some vanguard behavior for progress in which African Americans either capitalized on opportunities or created the circumstances in which possibilities might arise. It is important that this point be underscored as the scholarly and popular debates continue, prodding researchers and general readers alike to keep sight of the intractable forces of racism manifested in so many different ways, especially the psychological and economic components that have come down through history and made necessary the embracing of a movement such as the one led by Washington and Scott.⁸

So much previous history on African Americans has taken them to task for either do-nothing or misguided policies and strategies. However, this naysaying, doubting Thomas approach has not produced a great deal of reliable history in pointing the nation to thoughtful understanding of the Booker T. Washington movement and its means, over time, of resolution of racial problems. Language, conceptual convolution, and a general failure to tell it like it is have all allowed our country to coddle a self-deluded citizenry, linger too long in self-deception, and fail to assess the full danger of continued ignorance in race relations.

History is not a panacea and will never be perfectly conceived and written, but we can ask for more: a closer reading of the past. This I have tried to do with Scott’s life, taking him on his own term of leadership constructionalism. In a scholarly essay some years ago, I characterized the Booker T. Washington movement as one of statesmen of the African American community . . . constructing policies and programs to deal with the impositions and problems of racism, rather than to react with mere words or the threat of retaliation.⁹ I additionally noted that Scott and other Washington followers used the term constructionalist to explain what they were trying to achieve and that Washington himself wrote, The weakest race or individuals can condemn a policy. It is the work of a statesman to construct one.¹⁰ It seems to me that this language offers a more coherent, insightful, and instructive means of understanding Washington and Scott and, of course, prods us into mitigating or modifying much of the more serious past indictments of the two men.

It has not been easy to coax Scott from the shadows of the past over the long span of his life from 1873 to 1957. I know full well and better than most how Scott managed to cover his trail and stay obscured, affording me the opportunity to look only at the broad outline of his life despite my almost singular access to his papers reposed at Morgan State University. I hope, however, that I have given the present reader and Scott’s future biographers a trail that they can identify (despite the fog of the past) more readily and illuminate more cogently with new information based on the humble offerings of this biography. Be advised, however, that Scott did not hesitate to bring his detractors to the mourner’s bench, and this biography only sees itself as a lead, reinterpretative one in a modern, future series of works on Scott and those of his era.

Chapter 1:

Get Together Scott

Early Years

The young, suave, and unflappable Black Texan Emmett Jay Scott belonged indelibly to the latter half of the nineteenth century and those leaders thrashing out an agenda for their generation, which had been born in the formative years of freedom soon after the Civil War. In the remarkable, emergent generation of African American leaders coming of age during an era characterized most readily as the nadir for Black folks, Scott rose to prominence as a race man advancing boldly African American progress through implementation of political, economic, and sociocultural plans and work. ¹¹ The need to build organizations and institutions propelled him, and his steady sense of purpose and an unyielding belief in success guided Scott, becoming the essence of his leadership career. He rightly earned his monikers of Get Together Scott and a master of details early on for his constant calls for African American unity and collective movement in an age of organizing. He personified to other family members a bulldog Scott tenacity trait and was not a man to trifle with or cross. Friends thought of Scott as a smooth egg and right-hand bower to prominent and powerful men for whom he worked. Foes came unfairly to think of Scott as sinister and, in the words of one, as a crook if ever there was one. Both camps could agree on one matter, however: Scott became a master advocate for the causes in which he believed. Historian William Mugleston described Scott as an extraordinarily loyal, astute, and circumspect assistant. ¹² His courage was birthed, as was he, in Texas, a large, complex state that could prove either promising or perilous for Black folk in the half-century following the Civil War.

Information on the early history and background of Emmett Scott’s family is sketchy and mostly handed down through family oral histories, as was the case for many others who survived the nightmare of the holocaust of African enslavement. The resultant trauma left many stoical, like victims of other Procrustean forms of oppressive bondage. Those who did tell their stories often did so to find the heroic, noble, and tenacious in their forebears or themselves that bore repeating and that was in most instances instructive to their progeny. This differentiated, survivalist history was something the Scotts embraced to make a way, in the parlance of church folks, out of no way.¹ Indeed, Emmett embodied the bulldog determination the Scotts frequently alluded to when discussing their family history and trajectory. He himself drew on the life of his father, Horace, for a legacy moment that demonstrated the struggle of the former African captive in a manner not unlike stories conveyed in Booker T. Washington’s Up from Slavery, albeit one with a decided political twist and which unfolded with much less success in the long run. Horace’s foremost accomplishments had been those of surviving enslavement and the school of hard knocks, standing up in an uncustomary manner for himself and the political rights of his people during Reconstruction, and becoming a charter member of Trinity Methodist Episcopal Church’s board of trustees, and later a deacon. The family calibrated the story primarily to place the Scott children on the path to achievement.²

The Horace Scott remembered by his children was for the most part a quiet, mild-mannered, and humble man. He stood a shade under six feet tall, and one daughter described him as having weather-beaten, brown, leathery skin and hair that was typically Negro. His strong back endured long hours as he had done during slavery. According to family history and census data, Horace had been born in Virginia in 1850 and taken to Texas between 1861 and 1864 by a man reported to be both his enslaver and father during a period in which the enslaved population of Texas increased from 182,566 to 250,000. It was a time, in the assessment of one formerly enslaved man, Allen Manning, when it looked like everybody in the world was going to Texas, as bondsmen and women were being transported by their enslavers from as far away as the Mason–Dixon Line to the Lone Star State when the Confederacy began to weaken in 1863 under the strains of combat. As the war raged on in the country, enslavers increasingly looked west of the Mississippi River for refuge for themselves and their property. Texas seemed agreeable, indeed inviting, when as early as 1858, the state’s slaveholders and the prominent editor of the Austin State Gazette, John Marshall, proclaimed that slavery was growing too slow in Texas. . . . ‘Until we reach somewhere in the vicinity of two million slaves such a thing as too many slaves in Texas is an absurdity,’ as historian Quintard Taylor noted. A young lad trained as an artisan blacksmith, Horace was highly prized due to his fairly unique skills. In Texas, Horace’s father sought to sell or hire him to a perspective employer, depending on which would fetch him the best deal. The price of a skilled enslaved person ranged from $1,200 to $2,000 in Civil War Texas; alternately, the individual could be hired out for $275 annually in a state seemingly ideal for another slavocracy to be initiated. The practice of hiring out contributed to non-slaveholders’ support for slavery and thus its vibrancy in rural and urban areas of Texas just prior to the Civil War. It also introduced the bondsmen to the increasingly growing industrial system of slavery in the South.³

Texas’s vast richness made it seem ripe for profit-minded slaveholders and others trafficking in human bondage. The line encompassing the state stretched for some 3,080 miles, embracing over 265,000 square miles of land. Both planters and farmers in the interior of the state anticipated getting their crops to market along the five rivers that reached into Texas. The southeast’s soil became known for its abundant crop yield. The eastern part of the state, with its rich sedimentary corridor from Houston to Galveston, had warm temperatures, heavy rainfalls, and, occasionally, extreme winds that blew hot and dry air, giving the area a touch of what southern historian Ulrich B. Phillips described as the cosmic conspiracy against reality. With ten varying kinds of soil, from Houston’s black clay to the red loam prairie dirt, east Texas became the timber belt and an above-average region for growing cotton, although corn, sugar cane, rice, strawberries, potatoes, and peas were considered staples.⁴

Cotton became the premier commercial crop sustained by the peculiar institution of slavery.⁵ According to scholar Randolph Campbell, cotton bales harvested between 1850 and 1860 increased in value from 8,861 at $318,996 to 27,758 at $999,288. Wealthy planters and farmers also had ample reason to be drawn to Texas during the Civil War. They, however, could not escape the power of democracy, albeit a convoluted one that still condoned racism, when Union general Gordon Granger marched his troops into Galveston on June 19, 1865. Coming ashore in Galveston and galloping north, Granger followed Abraham Lincoln’s suit with a special emancipation proclamation, freeing the enslaved people of Texas later than those residing in other southern states, and Black Texans came to celebrate the historical occasion annually as Juneteenth, the day of manumission and jubilation. In 1865, however, celebration for the state’s African American population soon gave way to great concerns about the future. One formerly enslaved person noted accurately that we knowed freedom was upon us, but we didn’t know what it would bring. This former bondsman would be enjoined to find the real meaning of freedom, as would Horace Scott and many others.⁶

As a young, free man of fifteen, Horace Scott explored the parameters of his new status in the city of Houston. He had been distressed by the hard work of enslavement and travel to Texas, but he had not been sapped of the strength necessary to survive in freedom. His skills as an artisan had to be put to the test on the free labor market, but he had the advantage of being in a major urban center where Blacks were generally believed to have realized an economic and educational status surpassing that of those who remained in rural settings. Houston had become a bustling, growing area that had expanded remarkably from its humble origins in 1836, when two New York brothers, Augustus C. and John K. Allen, formed a land speculating company and paid $9,428 for the right to organize the Texas town. With each coming decade, the area showed more promise as a commercial entrepôt through which passed cotton and other crops to be shipped by water along the Buffalo Bayou to Galveston and then to other parts of the United States and Europe. By the 1850s, Houston had become the southeastern railroad center for the state, and through it passed the plentiful commodities of cotton, sugar, and animal hides to the highest bidders.⁷

The Civil War briefly disrupted the economic growth and expansion, but by 1868, the city had recovered and the municipal leaders embarked upon an ambitious plan to dredge and widen the channel port of the bayou to bring in more maritime traffic to improve the commercial vitality of the city. Houston then entered a period of stunning growth, moving to become what many called the Chicago of the South. By 1873, the Houston and Texas Central Railroad linked the city with Denison, which in turn offered direct passage over land to other parts of Texas, Missouri, Kansas, and the North. That same year, the prominent editor of Scribner’s Monthly, Edward King, remarked after a visit to the city: Houston is one of the most promising of Texas towns. In such a climate of optimism, whites and Blacks had many reasons for remaining.⁸

Horace Scott sensed the possibilities and decided to put down roots in Houston. There were no distant family members, collateral relatives, or loved ones to be found by trekking aimlessly through the South or back to Virginia, the place of his birth. It is understandable why Horace, at that young age and outside of any immediate familial or kinship arrangement, hastened to become a member of the small group of African Americans who severed their ties in 1865 with Houston’s prestigious, white First Methodist Episcopal Church South (where Blacks worshipped in quarters in the rear of the building) to establish their own religious edifice. The result was the Black Trinity Methodist Episcopal Church established in the city’s Freedmen’s Town.⁹ Placed in the center of the enclave where Blacks lived, Trinity Church, like other churches in the area, had its ready-made band of worshippers and every reason to foster community growth to spur its members on to develop a sense of unity for dealing with the social, political, and economic realities of freedom. The church was a family for the young Scott and a fountainhead for Black upliftment.¹⁰

Trinity’s first minister, Reverend Elias Dibble, guided the members of the congregation to pool funds in 1865 and purchase the tract of land between Travis and Milam Streets in the city’s northeast section. Half the land was set aside for building the new church, and the remaining portion was sold to congregational members, enabling them to build homes nearby and engage in collective development activities. Horace became one of the luminaries of the church and community by holding a position as a charter member of the board of trustees and serving later as a deacon.¹¹

Sustenance for Horace was not to take a backseat to soul-saving. He obtained employment as a helper for the Houston and Texas Central Railroad at about the same time he was busy helping build Trinity Methodist Church. In the early 1860s, Houston and Texas Central Railroad carried a monthly payroll of $36,690 and employed 665 workers. The employees worked under grueling labor conditions. Scott soon developed an abiding friendship at the railroad with another Black helper and fellow churchgoer, James Kyle.¹²

Kyle had come from Rosharon, Texas, a predominantly Black community situated less than fifty miles south of Houston and inhabited by antebellum free African Americans barred from living in Houston prior to the Civil War.¹³ Soon after 1865, Kyle migrated to Houston with his wife, Emma, who obtained work as a domestic servant in the city. Sometime prior to 1870, his sister, also named Emma, joined him in Houston as well. Both James Kyle and his sister were believed to have been fathered by a white man with the Kyle surname, although there is no information on him or the mother of the two. A white Houston physician named Dr. Kyle, however, accepted both Emma and James Kyle as distant relatives and attended to medical problems the siblings experienced while living in the city. It is possible that Emma and James Kyle may have been the property, relatives, or both, of William Jefferson Kyle, one of the largest slaveholders of east Texas. In the census of 1860, William Kyle was listed as a Tennessean by birth who was fifty years old and owner, along with his partner Benjamin Franklin Terry, of 108 African captives. The real and personal property value of the two men was cited at $173,750.¹⁴

James Kyle and Horace Scott both worked assiduously at the Houston and Texas Central Railroad and worshipped at Trinity Methodist Church, two circumstances that fostered and sustained their steadfast friendship. Their bond, according to Scott family members, soon led James to introduce his sister, Emma, to the eligible young bachelor, Horace Scott. A courtship ensued and the two were married in 1873. That same year saw the birth of Emmett, the first of eleven children (although only eight survived infancy) eventually born to the Scotts, who resided as a family in Freedmen’s Town, in the city’s Fourth Ward.¹⁵

Horace Scott & Politics

Horace Scott had obtained most of the trappings of African American respectability and seemed to have taken the long strides from slavery to freedom: work that provided an income; religion and fervent support of his church; and a young bride and infant son. Somewhere along the line, however, Horace had also acquired a deep faith in the Republican Party and sought to protect the voting rights of African Americans guaranteed by the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870. Horace’s role on one political day was a source of pride to all family members and often recounted. Like many other Blacks of the South, the Scotts backed the Republican Party, and for their first-born son, Emmett, this would be a lifelong allegiance despite the fact that he would live long enough to see the majority of Blacks shift to the Democratic Party in the mid-1930s.¹⁶

The blaring trumpet calls for an organized state Republican Party were heard significantly in Houston, Texas, two years after the Civil War. African Americans there and from around the state were poised to support the party they identified with manumission and a promising future. In the city on July 4, 1867, a delegation of 150 Blacks and twenty whites convened to establish the Texas Republican Party. The critical mass of Black Republicans led to important Black electoral representation, although not commensurate with the state’s African American population of 30 percent. Nonetheless, from the 1870s to 1897, forty-two Blacks served in the Texas legislature—thirty-eight in the House and four in the Senate. Texas, and Houston in particular, like many other parts of the South during Reconstruction, remained fierce battlegrounds with respect to race relations and the political rights of African Americans. Persuasion that could not be obtained by proselytizing preachers or pontificating politicians, insofar as Blacks were concerned, came otherwise, readily and decisively, out of the barrel of a gun. No issues were more controversial to heightening the potential violence or political confusion than the meaning and practices pertaining to the three new amendments—the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth—seemingly providing for full citizenship rights for (male) Blacks. Perhaps the most frightening reminder to whites of the new status of Freedmen was the specter of a Black American going to the polling booth on voting days. Nothing could so upset the political applecart than the selection of new leaders or the passage of some referendum emanating from Black Americans’ voting power, and thus an African American at the polls could be beaten, shot, or lynched by recalcitrant undemocratic whites. One of Texas’s most prominent Black politicos, J. Goldsteen Dupree, was murdered in 1873 for campaigning on behalf of the white Republican candidate for governor, Edmund J. Davis. Active that year in Republican Party politics and then twenty-three years of age, Horace Scott resisted this kind of intimidation.¹⁷

The general election for the Texas governorship in December 1873 prompted Horace Scott to pick up his gun and stand guard at a Houston polling booth to ensure that African Americans would be free to cast their votes. In a political contest one historian dubbed the most fraudulent in Texas history, the Republican Party’s incumbent and candidate for governor, former Union military officer and radical Republican, Edmund J. Davis, had endeared himself to the Black community, prompting the kind of support he received from Blacks such as Horace Scott. Having first been elected as governor in 1869 with overwhelming support from the Black community, Davis repaid African Americans with political jobs and other important appointments. He took the added precaution of hiring Black police officers and deploying African American militia to deal with the rising tide of violence directed at them and the Republican Party in general. Although the Democrats prevailed in the gubernatorial election of 1873, Horace had demonstrated his own loyalty to the Republican Party and Davis by fearlessly brandishing his rifle at the voting polls, ensuring that Black Americans could vote without fear of harm.¹⁸

The story of Horace’s political determination in the 1873 election became a critical part of the Scott family legacy, and it is significant that Emmett chose to concentrate his memory of his father as a race man on this major glorious and heroic moment. The lore’s elaborations became the family romance for the Scott children, as well as the inspiration for their mental and emotional equilibrium on the way up the ladder of success. Emmett appropriated and reified this story, yet over time, he relegated it to the background of his consciousness owing to his own racial uplift mantra. Horace stood as a reminder of the poverty and limited advancements of Blacks who were impacted by the scars of slavery. Struggling to gain respectability himself and consumed with succeeding financially and professionally, Emmett seems to have avoided stark reminders of the depth from which he had come, especially as he rose higher in the world. Horace did not grow up in the Black bourgeois circles of his son’s later life; thus, Emmett would draw on prominent friends to help his father obtain employment in Mound Bayou, Mississippi, and New Orleans, Louisiana. Emmett convinced himself that one had to know what they wanted early in life and move deftly, by both planning and postponement, to realize goals. The would-be-striver had to become the master of his fate and to master the art of preparation.¹⁹

Emma Scott

Emmett completely admired his mother, Emma. She fitted into the mold of smart and enterprising Black women who were doers of the deed in support of their families and neighborhoods. As one scholar noted, By the end of the Reconstruction era, a stable Black community had begun to form in Houston. Much of the credit for this properly belongs to women for asserting and testing their new won legal rights. Emma Scott exemplified the best tradition of Black womanhood—nurturing and protective of her family and drawing on rights and resources, both prompting more significant historical reexaminations into gender roles, specifically into what Black women could do and did.²⁰

Emmett remembered his mother as being tenacious and appreciative of how to access assets in the community, particularly the church as an institution of worldly welfare, to contribute to the advancement of her children and family. In the beginning of the 1870s, more than 150 Black churches had been founded in Texas and were places of worship, community centers, where social events, political meetings, and sporting events took place, writes historian Quintard Taylor. While Horace productively engaged in the church as a deacon and founder, Emma saw astutely how the church had to be made to function on behalf of the economic and educational welfare of families in the community, taking care of more than their spiritual needs. In this regard, she was a believer in the social gospel of progressive churches and ministers, which exhorted their Black parishioners to be as mindful of their saving accounts as of their souls. The ministers and trustees of the Scotts’ revered Trinity Church had been extremely active in this regard, and it was against this backdrop that Emmett witnessed his mother’s unusual ability for extracting resources and how Black institutions could be deployed for racial advancement, both collective and individual. To look upon the church merely as a place of worship was insufficient.²¹

Trinity Church had used funds in the 1870s to purchase Emancipation Park (an area designated for social interaction and relaxation), set aside land for Olive Cemetery where its members could be buried, and organized the Mutual Benevolent Society to assist unfortunate African American victims of poverty and discrimination. In the area of education, the role of Trinity Church had been critical in establishing Gregory Institute, one of the city’s most important schools for Blacks. Trinity’s minister, Reverend Dibble, along with the prominent African American state legislator, Richard Allen, persuaded officials of the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands (Freedmen’s Bureau) to use land donated by former Union general Edgar M. Gregory to build a private school for Houston’s Black youngsters in 1872. Gregory Institute became part of the city’s public school system for African Americans in 1873 and gained a reputation for training some of the more precocious students in Houston. The three oldest Scott children—Emmett, Walter, and Gertrude—were educated at Gregory Institute.²²

Wiley College

Emma Scott pushed her son Emmett to excel at Gregory in order to surmount obstacles to personal advancement and achievement. In 1887, when the gifted Scott completed Gregory Institute at fourteen years old, he was encouraged by his mother to compete for an academic scholarship to Texas’s most prominent Black college, Prairie View Agricultural and Mechanical College, established by a state legislative act in 1876. On two occasions, Scott failed to win the much-coveted academic scholarship. Emma Scott was convinced that the school overlooked her son owing either to nepotism or favoritism, or possibly both. She appealed in 1887 to Trinity’s minister, Wade Hampton Logan, and the institution’s prior pastor, Reverend Isaiah B. Scott, for support in enrolling Emmett in another college. The two ministers responded quickly, since their loyalty to Black uplift made this an important issue. Maintaining that no Methodist lad of ability should be denied