NASCAR African American Hall of Famer
Since 1982, the NASCAR Cup season has opened on Sunday in Florida. The Daytona 500 is one of the most recognizable brands in global auto racing. It’s odd that NASCAR and Daytona had become subjects for Black History Month. But there is one African American man who did break the color line in NASCAR decades ago and he’s in the NASCAR Hall of Fame now.
Wendell Oliver Scott was born in Danville, VA on August 29, 1921. His passion was motor racing but in the 1960’s, few wanted him at the racetrack. In 1969 he described to Charles Fox of Car and Driver Magazine an experience at a racetrack in Hillsboro, North Carolina: “You ought to have seen that bunch of drunks and fools. We had to call the police to get away. That was about four years ago. Man they really got rough.”
Scott was more than a sportsman racer. He started racing in NASCAR in 1961, the first African American to race regularly in the Southern-based series. His most successful season was in the 1964 season when he competed in 56 of 62 races with eight finishes in the top five and 25 in the top 10. But history was made in Jacksonville, December 1, 1963 – the third race of the season – when Scott started 15th, led 24 laps including the last one when he won. Wendell Scott remains the only African American to win in NASCAR’s premier series now called the Cup Series.
Scott drove a Chevrolet Bel Air to victory on the half-mile dirt track at Speedway Park in Jacksonville. He’d purchased the car from another NASCAR driver Ned Jarrett. With 25 laps remaining, Scott passed seven-time NASCAR champion Richard Petty for the win. Petty was limping along in an ailing car. Scott, however, was not announced as the winner of the race immediately after it was over. Buck Baker, the second-place driver, was initially declared the winner, but race officials “discovered” two hours later that Scott had not only won, but was two laps in front of the rest of the field. NASCAR awarded Scott the win two years later, but his family never actually received the trophy he had earned until 2010, 47 years after the race, and 20 years after Scott had died.
Wendell Scott had enormous success in regional racing series, which encouraged him to move up to the major league racing in NASCAR. Scott’s career was repeatedly affected by racial prejudice and problems with top-level NASCAR officials. The discrimination was withering. For example, early in his racing career Scott repaired his car with the help of a black mechanic, Hiram Kincaid, who previously worked with Ned Jarrett. They towed it to a NASCAR-sanctioned race in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. But the NASCAR officials refused to let him compete. Black drivers were not allowed, they said. As he drove home, Scott recalled, “I had tears in my eyes.” A few days later he went to another NASCAR event in High Point, North Carolina. Again, Scott said, the officials “just flat told me I couldn’t race. They told me I could let a white boy drive my car. I told ’em weren’t no damn white boy going to drive my car.”
Scott decided to avoid NASCAR and race with the Dixie Circuit and at other non-NASCAR speedways. He won his first race at Lynchburg, Virginia, only twelve days into his racing career. It was just a short heat race in the amateur class, but the victory hooked Scott. It was enough to keep him coming back for more.
He ran as many as five regional events a week, mostly at Virginia tracks. Some spectators would shout racial slurs. 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.”
“He was a racer,” said driver Rodney Ligon, who was also a moonshine runner. “You could look at somebody and tell whether they were a racer or not. 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 bodyguards.
In 1964 (the season he won in Jacksonville), Scott finished 12th in points despite missing several races. Over the next five years, Scott consistently finished in the top ten in the point standings. He finished 11th in points in 1965, was a career-high sixth in 1966, 10th in 1967, and finished ninth in both 1968 and 1969. His top year in winnings was 1969 when he won $47,451.
In 1999, Wendell Scott was inducted into the International Motorsports Hall of Fame. In April 2012, Scott was nominated for inclusion in the NASCAR Hall of Fame. He was finally inducted on January 30, 2015. He died December 23, 1990 from spinal cancer.
