Preface

The day I first met Wendell Scott, he didn’t act like somebody who’d played a noteworthy part in changing America’s moral landscape. He seemed to lack the self-importance that journalists learn to expect from many such people. I wanted to talk about his former career as a racing driver and the troubles he’d faced in challenging racial prejudice. But Scott kept changing the subject back to old auto radiators.

He’d collected a pile of them outside of his weathered shop in Danville, Virginia. He was loading them into his truck, figuring he’d sell them to the local junkyard. He hoped the price would be worth his time, because he was running late on repairing some cars for customers from his modest neighborhood. This visit from somebody who wanted to write his biography didn’t mean he could interrupt his customary routine of long workdays. He was friendly enough, but we’d have to talk while he ran errands and fixed grungy cars. “Got bills to pay,” he said.

Except for a couple of his old race cars rusting in the weeds nearby, Scott could have been just another struggling small-town mechanic: sixty-eight years old, showing every year, dirty overalls, work-worn hands, limping on a bad leg. I wondered if anybody else who had raced in seven Daytona 500s woke up that morning worrying about the salvage price for junk radiators.

I’d come to Danville intrigued by the little that I knew about Scott’s role as a sort of lone wolf among the nation’s integration pioneers. He’d broken the color barrier in southern stock car racing in 1952, a time of fiercely entrenched segregation. In contrast with some other courageous figures who confronted discrimination, he had no organized support system behind him, just family and friends. Unlike Jackie Robinson, Scott integrated an all-white sport without the backing of any powerful white patron in its hierarchy. Unlike Rosa Parks, Scott had no connections in the civil rights movement, no lawyers and organizers to publicize and challenge the injustices he faced. Although his difficult years as NASCAR’s first black driver took place during an era of historic racial conflict, the mainstream news media mostly ignored him.

For me, the idea of writing a book about Scott pulled together several threads from my past. As a boy, I’d been awed by the racers who drove Indy 500–style cars on the one-mile dirt oval outside my hometown of Syracuse, New York. The predatory howl of the Offenhauser engines in those rocket-like machines resonates in my memory still. As a teenager, I’d built a ’32 Ford hot rod before I was old enough to drive. As a newspaper reporter, I wrote many stories about prejudice and our stumbling, often reluctant progress toward equality.

In my thirties, I became an amateur racer, driving smaller, slower versions of those open-wheeled cars I’d loved as a kid. I could understand Scott’s obsession with racing. Even small-time race cars go fast enough to serve up the potent cocktail of addictive excitement that nourishes a driver’s passion for this sport — one whose appeal baffles many people with stronger instincts for self-preservation. Finally, like any reporter, I felt the pull of a story about an underdog bucking a sometimes hostile environment, and I had a vague notion that Scott’s experiences promised at least a small new window into those turbulent years that changed our country.

At one point that afternoon, fortunately for me, Scott needed to break loose a rusted bolt. Without being asked, I handed him a wrench of the correct type and size. For the first time, he gave me a sharp, narrow-eyed look of evaluation, signaling that, well, okay, maybe he could find some time after all to work with this stranger on a book about his life.

As I interviewed the many people who shared their thoughts for these pages, I began to get a sense of what may have been Scott’s most meaningful accomplishment. It wasn’t something he set out to do, but it happened anyway. I heard this same observation again and again: During the 1950s and ’60s, as civil rights conflict roiled the South, the first black person that many white southerners came to admire was the driver who’d integrated their beloved sport of stock car racing.

Week after week, year after year, Scott showed NASCAR audiences an example of skill, courage, a tenacious work ethic, and the character to persevere despite disappointments. His dogged pursuit of his dream refuted racial stereotypes. For the first time in their lives, numerous NASCAR fans found themselves rooting for a black man to defeat white men. By the mid-1960s, only a few superstars like Richard Petty got louder cheers and applause from southern speedway crowds than Scott. At a critical time in the nation’s history, Wendell Scott helped to change the way that many thousands of ordinary Americans looked upon black people.

To be sure, he wasn’t always exemplary. He had his flaws and blind spots, and he did some things he shouldn’t have. Nevertheless, the record of the civil rights era should include the improbable fact that those pioneers whose lives contributed to undermining the national embarrassment of segregation included a stock car driver whose credentials, incidentally, included some misadventures on the wrong side of the law. In certain circles of our culture, a few rough edges can help.

A close look at Scott’s story also provides some previously unexamined episodes from the history of NASCAR, which has grown in recent years into a major national sport and cultural phenomena. For NASCAR’s celebrated founder, Bill France Sr., the arrival of a black driver posed some business, political, and moral decisions, and in important ways what France chose to do, and not to do, shaped Scott’s fortunes.

As for those radiators Scott sold to the junkyard, he didn’t want to talk about how much he got paid. Apparently it wasn’t much.

Prologue

They drove all night from Virginia to Florida, three black men crowded into a scruffy GMC pickup, towing a stock car through the segregated South of 1963. As usual, Wendell Scott had a loaded pistol under the seat and at least a dozen problems on his mind.

With two friends as his volunteer crew, Scott was heading for a speedway in a tough, shabby white neighborhood on the outskirts of Jacksonville. He would race against twenty-one white men in front of a white crowd. As NASCAR’s first black driver, Scott had been in this sort of situation many times since he’d begun racing eleven years ago. But these days, with civil rights turmoil inflaming the South, racial hostility seemed to worsen by the week. Lately, his roughneck sport had served up one nasty surprise after another.

After midnight, Scott’s friends took turns driving so he could get some sleep. He’d been laboring over his battle-weathered race car all day. His eyes felt gritty, and he leaned back and tried to relax. At forty-two, Scott was wiry, light-skinned, almost six feet tall. Already his narrow face showed the worry lines of an older man. He wore frayed coveralls. His hands were nicked and grimy like old wrenches. He had a thin mustache, touches of gray in his hair, deep squint lines around his shrewd blue eyes, and unsatisfied hopes that gnawed at his guts.

To many casual acquaintances in NASCAR, he seemed amiable and unpretentious. They liked his country-flavored speech and the quiet, uncomplaining way he went about his business. Few realized that this unassuming exterior, carefully calibrated, served Scott as a protective shield, concealing parts of his real self that some white people might find unacceptable.

That night, Scott’s worries ranged from the shortcomings of his vehicles to the odds for someday realizing his ambitions. His old truck wasn’t much good for towing. Even with his eyes shut, he could feel it trying to wander out of its lane. At home, overdue bills covered his bedroom dresser. Trips like this one, into the Deep South, were getting more dangerous. His career wasn’t where he wanted it to be. His pistol was illegal — no permit. His race car wasn’t fast enough. He wondered when his next attack of ulcer pain would leave him throwing up by the roadside.

The green 1956 pickup rolled south through the Carolinas and Georgia, past all of the places where he and his friends could not buy a meal, rent a motel room, or take a sip of water from a drinking fountain. WHITES ONLY, the signs warned, or sometimes, NO NIGGERS. When they needed a bathroom, they looked for bushes near the highway. They brought their own food, which they ate in the truck. When Scott drove his first race at the Danville Fairgrounds speedway in 1952, black southerners were still expected to step aside for whites on the sidewalk, and the civil rights movement was still in its infancy.

Now, with the movement gaining strength, racial violence racked the South. During the past couple of years, the furrows across Scott’s forehead had deepened. They gave him the look of someone peering into the near future and spotting trouble. Just in the past six months, five southern blacks had died in racial killings. After a recent race in Birmingham, he’d had to flee when he learned that white men were plotting to seize his race car and burn it. Before every trip to a racetrack, Scott made sure his .38-caliber revolver was cleaned, loaded, and stowed under the seat of his truck.

Those who knew Scott best understood something that few competitors and fans recognized: His low-key humility was partly genuine, partly camouflage for a driven personality and high-horsepower ego. Under his veneer of modesty, he saw himself as deserving a niche in history, one at least as eminent as that of Jackie Robinson, who had broken the color barrier in modern major-league baseball in 1947 and whom Scott regarded with considerable rivalry. Privately, Scott believed without reservation that he had the talent to be one of the country’s top racing drivers, if only he could land the sponsorship to get into a competitive race car. Three years ago, he’d moved up to NASCAR’s top-level series, the Grand National circuit (known today as the Sprint Cup). In the minor leagues, he’d won dozens of races and two championships, but he still didn’t have a single Grand National victory. Every day he thought about how badly he needed that first major-league win.

His race car, a pale blue 1962 Chevy, rolled along behind the truck on a tow bar; Scott didn’t have a trailer. The Chevy, past its prime, was faded and patched in spots. Scott had bought it from a driver who’d moved on to a lucrative sponsorship deal. In a series whose elite teams had large professional crews and generous backing from Detroit’s auto manufacturers, the lettering on the Chevy’s front fenders spelled out Scott’s place in the financial hierarchy: MECHANIC: ME.

As often happened on the way to a race, Scott’s ulcers doubled him over with nausea during the trip to Jacksonville. They made some quick stops so he could run to the ditch. But something beyond the pain and the money problems kept Scott wakeful tonight — a sharpened sense of anticipation about this particular race. He had a feeling, against the odds, that Jacksonville could be the race that turned his career around. Toward dawn, he gave up trying to nap. He couldn’t get his mind to slow down. There were rewards to a life driven by the obsessive passion for racing, but the gift of letting go and relaxing wasn’t among them. He’d raced many times on little sleep or none at all.

The sun was up on the morning of December 1 when Scott and his friends, Winston “Wild Horse” Chaney and James “Brother” Robinson, pulled into Jacksonville Speedway Park and started getting ready for the hundred-mile race that would be run that afternoon. This wasn’t one of the circuit’s high-profile events. Jacksonville’s run-down half-mile dirt oval was much smaller than the major speedways at Daytona Beach, Florida, and Darlington, South Carolina, where NASCAR’s most prestigious competitions took place. The Jacksonville track’s poorly maintained surface often broke up during a race into bumps and ruts. For exactly those reasons, though, Scott figured that this track offered his best chance for a surprise victory that might bring him some support from one of the auto companies. He’d won many races on tracks just like this one. Even with his mediocre Grand National cars, he’d twice finished third on half-mile dirt tracks, beating cars with much more power. Last season, he’d outqualified the entire field at Savannah’s half-mile oval. Sometimes on a dirt track, especially a bumpy one, the best driver could outrun the best car.

If he could win today, he might move closer to the big break he’d been hoping for — sponsorship from Ford Motor Co. One of Ford’s top executives, Lee Iacocca, was creating the most ambitious racing program in the auto industry’s history. With Henry Ford II’s enthusiastic support, Iacocca was pouring millions of dollars into teams competing in NASCAR, the Indianapolis 500, and elsewhere. This year, factory-backed Fords dominated Grand National racing. For a black driver in a southern sport, corporate sponsorship remained a long shot. But the past decade had brought some historic changes in the country; maybe his time was coming.

The day was sunny, breezy, and cool. About five thousand fans filed into the crude wooden grandstands and bleachers as the drivers ran their practice session and began their individual qualifying laps to determine the race’s starting lineup. All the spectators, even those in the top rows, knew they’d be showered with dirt as the cars sped past. The roar of the unmuffled engines shook the windows of the small houses in the neighborhood around the track. Some of those homes sat on unpaved streets. Some had no electricity.

NASCAR was still a largely southern sport in the ’60s, and its races drew a mostly blue-collar crowd. Only one journalist showed up to cover the Jacksonville race, Gene Granger of the Florida Times-Union, the local newspaper. The civil rights conflicts roiling the South, Granger recalled, had stirred up considerable anger among local white people, including many spectators at the track. “There were some real rednecks there — I mean some fightin’ rednecks. That wasn’t the friendliest part of town. There were hot feelings there.”

When Scott’s turn came to run his qualifying laps, the track surface was already breaking up. His stiffly sprung car handled badly, bouncing from one pothole to another, losing traction, sliding erratically. His qualifying speed left him with a poor starting position for the race: fifteenth of twenty-two cars. He jacked up the Chevy and crawled underneath, studying the chassis, looking for some adjustment to make the car less clumsy. Abruptly, an inspiration struck: a simple, radical idea to soften the suspension drastically. At this point, he had nothing to lose by taking a chance. Nobody at Ford would be sending Iacocca a memo about a driver who’d qualified fifteenth. Working hastily, he removed one of the two shock absorbers at each corner, giving the wheels more freedom to bounce.

The change worked even better than he’d hoped. A few laps into the race, Scott realized he probably had the best-handling car in the field. “That thing knew where to go!” he would recall. “Working! Just working with that track. I was passing ’em as fast as I could catch ’em.” Broken wheels and axles took out several drivers. Others crashed. Many struggled with cars that were difficult to control.

Scott stayed on the lead lap, pacing himself, trying not to punish his car. Late in the race, he found himself challenging for the lead. He was storming around the bumpy track in second place, sliding the heavy car around the rutted turns, his rear wheels spitting dirt. He listened to the melody of the tires skittering along the rough surface, and he breathed the bouquet of hot oil and rubber, and he couldn’t remember when he’d ever felt better in a race car. Maybe never. Time unfurled slowly, and the car seemed part of his mind, and he knew in his nerves and bones why he was addicted to doing this. The bellow of the big V-8 engine rose and fell in a rhythm, booming in the Chevy’s gutted-out interior, singing to Scott that his luck might be changing at last.

Not far ahead, the first-place car slid around the turns, a bright blue, factorysponsored ’63 Plymouth, number forty-three. Scott liked the Plymouth’s driver, a friendly, talented young man who was quick to flash his wide grin. But Scott knew that Richard Petty, for all his charm, could be risky to pass. The previous year in a race in Georgia, he’d run Scott into a guardrail. Today, though, luck was on Scott’s side. With twenty-five laps to go, Petty’s car slowed abruptly; the rough track had damaged a steering arm. Scott swept past Petty into the lead.

Suddenly the NASCAR officials running the event had a problem they’d never faced before. Apparently, in just a few minutes, a Negro driver would win the race. Then he’d go to victory circle and step up for his trophy. If custom prevailed, he would kiss the race queen, a white woman, in front of the white crowd.

Black men had been lynched for less.

On the next lap, Scott glanced at the scoreboard and registered a quick surprise: His number was no longer there. All through the race, NASCAR had posted the numbers of the cars in the top five positions. Now, for the first time, all of the numbers had disappeared from the scoreboard. He waved at his crewmen in the pits, pointing at himself and at the scoreboard, trying to find out if they knew what was happening. They didn’t understand. On his next lap, they held up the gas can — did he need fuel? Scott waved that off. Next lap, they held up a tire. He waved that off, too, and kept on charging around the track.

He didn’t know what to think. Years ago, the top man in his sport, Bill France Sr., the charming autocrat who ran NASCAR like a czar, had assured Scott that his color didn’t matter, that NASCAR always would treat him like any other driver.

But why had the scoreboard gone blank?

On what should have been the last lap of the race, Scott roared across the finish line, looking for the checkered flag. The NASCAR official in the flag stand just watched him go by. Scott ran another lap and crossed the finish line again.

Still the flagman stood motionless.

Scott kept on driving hard, every little rattle in the car sounding ominous now. The euphoria of driving was fading, and he was slipping back into the everyday world. For years his memory would return to the two thoughts that ran through his mind right then. This was the moment he’d anticipated for so long, his chance to show Iacocca’s people what he could do, the payoff for all his work and troubles, all the times he’d been treated wrong and had to swallow his anger — so what the hell was going on?

At the same time, Wendell Scott was thinking that he knew perfectly well what was going on, knew it like he knew his own skin.