Wendell Scott

I haven't done anything for Black History Month, but I just watched a show on ESPN2 that inspired me to do this. It was Wendell Scott: A Race Story. I've known about Wendell Scott for years and he's one of my heroes, but this 2011 production moved me to tears. Check your listings and try to see it.

Before I tell you a little about him, I'm gonna go out on a limb and saw it off between me and the tree trunk. Ready?

If it weren't for Wendell Scott, Barack Obama wouldn't be President.

Wendell Scott is the only black man to ever win a NASCAR Grand National, today's Sprint Cup, stock car race. The win was given to a white driver after three extra laps and he was only told he had won after the mostly white fans had left the track. He got cheated out of the trophy which the white driver, Buck Baker (I think), took home.

Once he won a steak dinner as a prize and the restaurant didn't serve blacks. A white driver went in and got it for him and gave it to him outside.

[...] According to a 2008 biography of Scott, he broke the color barrier in Southern stock car racing on May 23, 1952, at the Danville Fairgrounds Speedway. [...]

That took balls, folks.

He ran as many as five events a week, mostly at Virginia tracks. Some spectators would shout racial slurs, but many others began rooting for him. Some prejudiced drivers would wreck him deliberately. They "just hammered on Wendell," former chief NASCAR photographer T. Taylor Warren said. "They figured he wasn't going to retaliate." And they were right—Scott felt that because of the racial atmosphere, he could not risk becoming involved in the fist-fights and dirty-driving paybacks that frequently took place among the white drivers.

Many other drivers, however, came to respect Scott. They saw his skills as a mechanic and driver, and they liked his quiet, uncomplaining manner. They saw him as someone similar to themselves, another hard-working blue-collar guy swept up in the adrenalin rush of racing, not somebody trying to make a racial point. "He was a racer -- you could look at somebody and tell whether they were a racer or not," said driver Rodney Ligon, who was also a moonshine runner. "Didn't nobody send him [to the track] to represent his race -- he come down because he wanted to drive a damn racecar." Some white drivers became his close friends and also occasionally acted as his bodygards.

You can go read about him, but to sum it up, he raced against segregation and Jim Crow as well as other drivers on a poor man's budget because he loved racing and he beat 'em driving junk.

He was forced to retire due to injuries from a racing accident at Talladega, Alabama in 1973. He achieved one win and 147 top ten finishes in 495 career Grand National starts.

The film Greased Lightning starring Richard Pryor was loosely based on Scott's biography.

Mr. Scott was just one of many who paved the way for Barack Obama, of course, but he did it in a brave and unusual manner in a whites-only-except-for-him venue that never made the papers outside the South.

He was a brave and quiet man in a sport that didn't want him. He is now one of the Legends Of NASCAR and recognized as a pioneer.

Thanks for the inspiration and role model, Wendell, and wherever you are, put the hammer down and don't forget to turn left.