April 23, 2018 • 28 mins
Wendell Scott was a black driver from the early days of NASCAR. After driving a taxi, working as a mechanic, and hauling moonshine, he started racing in the Dixie Circuit and other non-NASCAR races in Virginia.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, everybody. Before we get started today, we just wanted
to let folks know that Universal Fan con where we
were planning to be from April and to do a
live show there, has been postponed until further notice. Although
we don't have any other information right now about when
the convention might be rescheduled, we do want to apologize
to anybody who purchased a ticket or who plans to
(00:22):
come out and see us. Will post an update with
any official information that we receive on our website at
miss in history dot com at the link that says
live shows. Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History class
from how Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to
(00:45):
the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frying.
I really like the TV show Timeless. It is a
favorite of mine. I was really sad when it got
canceled and then really happy when it got uncancelled. And
in the first season of this show, it seemed like
every time I turned around, I would think, hey, we
(01:06):
have an episode of our podcast about this. It was
like there was a Hindenburg, and there was Jim Booie,
and there was Josphine Baker, and there was Davy Crockett,
and it went on and on and on. There were
so many that before the second season started up, I
actually made a board on our Pinterest called as Seen
on Timeless where I pinned all the episodes that relate
(01:27):
to past episodes of that show. So early on in
season two, I was watching Timeless and a historical figure
showed up on the screen that made me go, Okay,
stop everything, this has to be a podcast and it's
It was a very similar reaction to the one that
several of the people on the screen and the show had,
(01:47):
because this is about Wendell Scott, who was a black
driver from the early days of NASCAR. Almost his entire
racing career took place in the segregated South. I didn't
go into this in tending to write a two part
podcast on on NASCAR, but once again we have a
surprise two part sports podcast. Um. Also, I wanted to
(02:11):
note that there are people who knew him who pronounced
his name more like Windell, but the vast majority seemed
to say Wendell, including some interview with his children, some
interviews with his children, So if at some point you're
watching old TV footage about Wendell Scott, and you're like,
why did they say Windell? Let's wendell seems to be
(02:33):
the more common. Some of that is probably an accent thing, right, yes, probably,
like I could see someone with a heavy Southern accent
drawing out that second syllable a little bit more well.
And there were times that they would make rhymes uh
like chance. We don't really most of them uh are
are a use of a word we wouldn't necessarily say
(02:55):
on the show that would want rhyme with it if
you said it when dell, So that might have influenced
some people's pronunciation as well. So. Wendell Scott was born
in Danville, Virginia, on August He was one of four
children in a family that included half siblings from his
(03:15):
parents prior marriages. Danville was largely a working class city,
with its major industries being tobacco and textiles. Wendell's father
was employed as a driver for a couple of more
affluent white families, and he also worked on their cars.
From an early age, Wendell was learning the basics of
auto mechanics while helping his father. During the Great Depression,
(03:38):
work in Danville started to become scarce and the family
moved to Pennsylvania, where his dad got a job in
a Studa baker factory, and it was while they were
living out there that Wendell's parents split up. Wendell didn't
see his father again for years, and this was really
hard on him. He developed a stammer and he didn't
do very well in school. After a while, his mother
(03:59):
moved of them to Kentucky, where she had some other family.
When his grandmother's health started to decline, the family was
moved back to Danville so Wendell's mother could help take
care of her. And this is really when Wendell started
to experience the realities of segregation. His schools in Pennsylvania
and Kentucky had been integrated. When he remarked to his
(04:20):
mother that there weren't any white students or teachers at
his school in Danville, she told him, and there won't
be either. By his teens, Wendell was already working to
try to help support the family and to buy his
first car, which was a beat up Model T that
he rebuilt using parts scavenged from a junkyard. He grew
sweet potatoes and tobacco to cell and he worked at
(04:42):
a drug store he left school before graduating from high
school so he could become a bricklayer because he wanted
to help the family afford to send his younger sister
to college. Wendell Scott had spent most of his life
saying that he didn't want the kind of life that
was typical for a black man living in Danville, which
was likely to include difficult, manual labor that came with
(05:03):
significant health risks. Working in tobacco fields and textile plants
was physically grueling work, and lung problems were common due
to the exposure to tobacco and fabric dust. He didn't
really want to be a low paid cog in a
wheel that was mostly making money for someone else. These
are still very difficult and grueling jobs with risks of
(05:25):
of lung damage, but they're also a lot less common
because most of the taxtile plants moved to Mexico and
people quit smoking so much. Scott soon found that being
a bricklayer just had too much in common with all
those jobs that he had spent his whole life saying
he didn't want to do, so he quit. He started
(05:45):
driving for a taxi company, and gradually he saved up
enough money to afford his own cab. Scott developed a
reputation for being the kind of taxi driver who would
get you where you were going fast and would probably
also know where you be able to find some not
necessarily legal indulgences along the way. When somebody got into
(06:06):
his cab and mentioned wanting a drink, he knew where
to get one. After the end of prohibition, the Commonwealth
of Virginia allowed the sale of liquor in state managed
alcoholic beverage control stores, but liquor by the drink was
still illegal. He wasn't personally much of a drinker, though
he was a devout member of the New Hope Baptist Church.
(06:26):
Although he wasn't always actively attending services. Let's get you
there fast reputation also earned Scott a police record pretty quickly,
with most of his citations being for speeding. One officer
in particular seemed to have a grudge against him and
wrote out eleven of the thirteen tickets that he received
during his time as a taxi driver. Then, when he
(06:48):
was twenty, he was charged in a scheme to sell
stolen motor oil, for which he served sixty days at
a prison farm as part of a plea deal in
Scott met Mary Bell Calls while driving his cab, and
soon they were courting. In nineteen forty two, during World
War Two, Scott was drafted and he served as part
of the hundred first Airborne, although his actual work was
(07:11):
about maintaining vehicles and doing manual labor. He married Mary
while on leave on July tenth, four and she gave
birth to their first child while he was still deployed.
They would go on to have six children together. Later on,
they would also raise a seventh child, who Scott had
with another woman during his racing career, and who they
took in in the nineteen fifties after the young boy's
(07:34):
mother was killed. After the war, Scott went back to
Danville and the city refused to renew his taxi license
on the justifiable grounds he had way too many speeding
tickets to allow that. So Scott started working on a
plan to move the family out to California, but he
was convinced to stay in Danville when the owner of
the city's Black funeral home asked if he could work
(07:57):
on his cars before he left. So Scott was picking
up other work as a mechanic building on the knowledge
that he picked up from his father as a child
and from his military service during the war. This mechanic
work started to blossom into a small business housed in
a tiny building that the owner of the funeral home built,
But Scott took on a partner who wasn't nearly as
(08:20):
conservative with their money as he wanted them to be.
While Scott planned to pay both of them a salary
while carefully saving and reinvesting for their business, his partner
kept giving himself advances on his pay and eating into
that next week's budget. This venture ended abruptly when Scott's
partner was killed in an accident that also burned the
shop down. Scott was becoming well known as a good mechanic,
(08:44):
but with the loss of a little shop and everything
in it, he needed more income than he could really earn,
so he turned to a second source of income, which
was running bootleg whiskey. And we will talk more about
that after a sponsor break. When Wendell Scott got out
(09:06):
of the military, as we said earlier, prohibition was over.
It was legal to buy hard liquor by the bottle,
but not by the drink in Virginia, but there was
still a lot of bootlegging activity going on in the
Appalachian mountains and foothills. Franklin County, Virginia, was just down
the road from Danville, tucked into the foothills of the
Blue Ridge Mountains, and it was home to a thriving
(09:28):
bootleg industry. Scott would pick up moonshine in Franklin County,
where it could be bought for fifty five cents a point,
and then drive it to Charlotte, where it sold for
twice as much thanks to being in a dry county.
He had some local customers in and around Danville as well,
but the bulk of his driving was to Charlotte and back,
almost all of it at night. This is a complex
(09:50):
multi person operation. Scott usually worked with a partner who
coordinated with the actual bootleggers. Scott himself worked with the
buyers and had little contact directly with the people who
were actually making the moonshine. He had multiple cars that
were especially outfitted for bootlegging, which looked like your typical
junker from the outside, but had a powerful engine and
(10:12):
an interior that was outfitted to smuggle hidden product. He
would keep these cars stashed in various inconspicuous spots in
the foothills, leaving his regular car somewhere else out of
sight before getting into one to move the product. While
bootlegging was very lucrative, it was also extremely dangerous, and
Scott always kept a loaded pistol under the seat of
(10:34):
his bootleg cars. It was also expensive. He had to
sink a lot of his profit into his cars, especially
if one of them became too recognizable to the police
and then he had to replace it. It was also
very stressful, and it was while hauling whiskey that he
started to develop problems with stomach ulcers, which would cause
him trouble for the rest of his life. And yes,
we know it is not clear whether stress aggrevates ulcers,
(10:57):
but he and the people around him definitely made the connection. Unsurprisingly,
there are a lot of very dramatic and colorful stories
about Scott's time hauling moonshine, especially as he became notorious
for doing it in Virginia and North Carolina. He was
an excellent driver and he kept his cars really well maintained,
so it was hard for an officer to catch him alone.
(11:20):
Officers would work together with one of them staying out
of sight along a road until another radioed end that
Scott was on the way past. Once he was notified
that hidden officer would come out of hiding would tail
Scott with the headlights off until he was ready to
make a move. Scott like to say that he could
outrun the police, but not their radios. And that was
(11:40):
what happened one day when Scott was being pursued by
an officer with the headlights off and didn't realize he
was there until the officer shot out one of his tires.
Scott dove out of the moving car, hoping that it
would travel far enough to serve as a diversion. It
crashed pretty quickly and Scott hid out in some bushes
until other officers are arrived with a bloodhound to try
(12:01):
to find him, and that dog did. According to Scott,
it looked right at him and then it turned around
and led officers in another direction. And interviews he was like,
I cannot explain it. That dog just let me go.
I'm having such like weird bootlegger versions of Disney films
(12:23):
in my There was also a high speed Christmas Day
chase when a couple of customers had asked for some
product and Scott decided to take them to somebody he
knew who had a supply of it. They were in
the family car, not expecting to see any kind of
trouble on Christmas morning, but after having picked up the whiskey,
they were spotted by police on the way back to Danville.
(12:47):
What followed was a high speed chase, part of it
with Scott driving backwards on a country road after an
officer cut him off. See this is just like to
live in Diana, l A. Or like baby driver in
Nascar country. To me, it's very baby driver. But on
a dirt road. Scott got enough distance between him and
(13:09):
his pursuers that he was able to stop and stash
the whiskey and presumably get his passengers out of the car.
Then he drove back to his auto garage and Danville
got out of the car, took the engine out of it,
left it hanging from the hoist, and left. He wound
up in court after this incident, and his defense was
that the license plate number the police provided belonged to
(13:30):
a car that was in his shop with the engine out,
which they could go see for themselves. He claimed that
it had been there, broken down for more than a
week and the charges were dismissed. Uh, I think it's
in a story Corps interview. There's an interview where somebody
else relays this story um and says something like that.
(13:51):
The judge told the officers, next time, you bring me
him and the liquor and the engine of Tually, though
Scott's partner apparently set him up. This led to another
high speed chase on April ninety nine. Scott's goal in
these chases was usually to make it to the highway,
where he had more room to maneuver and could usually
(14:13):
outrun law enforcement. But this time, just before he got
to the highway, he had to swerve to avoid a
group of drunken pedestrians, some of whom were his customers,
and his car, which was full of whiskey, crashed into
a house. Local law enforcement charged Scott with reckless driving
and turned the moonshine issue over to federal authorities. A
(14:36):
federal grand jury delivered an indictment on September twelfth, ninety nine,
and although Scott pleaded guilty to his charges, he was
sentenced to three years probation because he didn't have any
prior moonshine convictions, which is kind of funny given his reputation. Yeah. Yeah, Well,
Scott's wife had always been terrified of his work in moonshine.
(14:58):
He had kept its secret from her first, and when
she found out, she wanted him to stop. Now that
he had a conviction on his record, continuing to be
involved with bootlegging was a much bigger risk, so he
needed to find another way to try to make more money,
and that was what brought him to NASCAR, which we're
going to talk about after a sponsor break. Before NASCAR
(15:25):
was formed, auto racing had already been going on in
the United States for decades. Basically, for as long as
there have been cars, people have been racing them. The
American Automobile Association or Triple A was a major player
in these early pre NASCAR years of racing, and people
race lots of different types of cars before World War Two.
(15:46):
And although racing has long been associated mostly with the South,
a lot of these early races were really driven by
and catered to the interests of Northerners. It was more
about the fact that you could keep a racetrack drivable
year round in the South a lot easier than you
could in the North. Than anything that was specific to
Southern culture. Racing was far less popular during World War
(16:08):
Two since things like gasoline, rubber, and metal were all
critical to the war effort. But after the war was over,
stock car racing started to become the most popular variety
of auto racing in the United States. So a stock
car is a racing car that has the same basic
chassis as one that's in commercial production, although there are
a number of modifications that can be part of stock
(16:29):
car racing as well. The largest sanctioning body for stock
car racing in the United States as the National Association
for Stock Car Auto Racing or NASCAR, founded by Bill
France Senior, who was known as Big Bill. NASCAR was
founded in Daytona Beach, Florida, on February and France also
(16:50):
served as the organization's first president. He put a particular
focus in promoting the sport and building new racetracks in
the South. Part of the lore of at the beginning
of NASCAR is that it started out with a bunch
of bootleggers in and near the North Carolina Mountains racing
each other and honing their skills evading the law. And
then Big Bill France saw that all these homegrown races
(17:12):
had their own rules and standards and thought the sport
of racing could benefit from a governing body to establish
standards and sanctions specific races. There's definitely some truth to
the idea that a lot of the first NASCAR drivers
had a history of involvement in bootlegging, and there was
also a lot of bootlegging money that made its way
back into the sport by funding cars and tracks and publicity.
(17:36):
There wasn't a lot of segregation in bootlegging. People who
were making whiskey and driving it around and drinking it.
We're all over the racial spectrum and they were all
on the wrong side of the law together basically. So
there were other black bootleggers, and Wendell Scott had a
lot of history with this in the same part of
the country. But that wasn't quite how Wendell Scott came
(18:00):
to be a NASCAR driver. After his conviction in someone
took him to a race at the Danville Fairgrounds. These
races were not part of NASCAR. They were part of
the Dixie Circuit, which ran several races in Virginia and
North Carolina. Watching this race was exhilarating, and Scott thought
it was something he might try to do, but he
(18:21):
wasn't really sure how to go about getting into it. Simultaneously,
racing promoter Martin Rogers wanted to figure out how to
draw a bigger audience at the Fairgrounds races. The Dixie
Circuit was struggling in Danville because the economy in the
area wasn't great and people didn't really have the extra
cash to go spend at the races. Rogers eventually thought
(18:43):
a good publicity stunt might be to introduce a black driver,
somebody who was really good and could at least give
the white drivers who were already part of the circuit
a good run for their money. He didn't have a
lot of luck finding someone who fit this bill, so
he came up with an ingenious way to figure route
which black men in Danville might be good at driving fast.
(19:04):
He asked the cops. The cops told him that if
they wanted a black man who could drive, they wanted
Wendell Scott. So Rogers got in touch with Scott. And
there's a little discrepancy in the dates, but it seems
as though his first race was on May twenty, nineteen
fifty two. He borrowed one of his old whiskey cars
from a relative that he'd sold it to after it
(19:26):
had become too recognizable to law enforcement. There are a
lot of accounts that say that Scott came in third
and his first race at Examvil Fairgrounds, winning fifty dollars,
but according to his recounting of it in the book
Hard Driving, The Wendell Scott Story by Brian Donovan, he
started out really well, but pushed his car so hard
at the beginning that it didn't have the stamina to
(19:48):
make it all the way through the whole race. He
pulled out a couple of laps before the race was over.
In spite of this, and in spite of some of
the spectators booing and throwing things at him, he loved
that first race. He repaired the car that night and
the next day towed it to Winston Salem, North Carolina,
bringing some friends with him with the hope of racing
(20:09):
it at Bowman Gray Stadium. Bowman Gray is a NASCAR
sanctioned track, and it was the first sanctioned track to
do weekly races, holding them every Saturday night in the summer.
It's likely that the first people he talked to a
bowm and gray that night didn't realize that Wendell Scott
was black. He had a medium brown complexion that had
kind of a ruddy tone, and his eyes were blue.
(20:32):
Especially with a hat on, people often thought that he
was white, so at first everything seemed to be progressing normally.
He was allowed to register for the race, His car
was inspected and he was told that he would need
to install a safety belt. He went over to the
tracks shop to buy one, and the next thing he knew,
he was being told he couldn't race after all, but
(20:53):
no reason was given as to why. When Scott had
been talking to officials at the track, he'd been by himself,
but when he went over to the shop to get
the safety belt, he took some of his friends with him,
and his suspicion was that when officials saw them altogether,
they concluded that, he, like his friends, was black and
banned him from the race. A similar scenario played out
(21:15):
the next day in high Point, North Carolina. So Scott
went back to the Dixie Circuit, where he scored his
first win on June fourth, ninety two at the age
of thirty, and after a while he started branching out
from the Dixie Circuit into other non NASCAR races in Virginia,
and he started winning a lot of those two. Even
(21:36):
though he was being allowed to enter these races, it
wasn't all smooth sailing. On July two, he won the
Amateur class race and asked if he could enter the
Sportsman class race that night as well. The races promoter
asked the spectators to vote on it, and more than
half of them stood up as a yes. But during
the Sportsman class race, a wheel flew off his race
(21:58):
car and into the stands. Several spectators were injured. Some
of the crowd was outraged, and news accounts of what
had happened focused on his race. Meanwhile, Scott spent hours
at the hospital afterward talking to the people who had
been hurt. Violence among the drivers was also pretty common
in this racing scene. If one driver ran another one
(22:21):
off the track during the race, he might get punched
for it afterward, and the idea of payback was also common.
If you intentionally wrecked somebody's car during a race, they
might wreck yours during the next one. Scott did everything
he could to stay out of all of this, Although
there were other black drivers before Wendell Scott started racing,
(22:41):
he was always the only black driver at these events,
and apart from being the only participant of his race,
these events were places that were often thick with racism.
In a world where a black man might be lynched
for allegedly whistling and a white woman, there was no
way he was going to run the risk of striking
white man over a stock car race. It's one of
(23:03):
the things that's most incredible to me about his story
is that he was in a basically exclusively white sport
almost I mean, there were a few other black drivers
and in some cases like um all black racing teams
and networks, but like for the most part, an exclusively
white sport and a place that had active and overt
(23:24):
violent history toward the black community, and like the the
logo of the Dixie Circuit was a pair of crossed flags.
One of the flags was the checkered flag that drops
when the race is over, and the other one was
a Confederate flag. Like, he was doing all of this
in completely hostile territory, and and the only exception to
just really keeping his head down and trying not to
(23:47):
make waves would be when spectators or other races. Racers
threatened his children, which actually happened fairly often, everything from
shouting racist slurs at them to one case where somebody
threw a lit firecracker at his son and burned his hand.
But even then, he was a lot more likely to
storm at somebody and shout at them than he was
(24:09):
to actually strike them, and he also didn't have the
luxury of payback. Scott had no sponsors, no paid pit crew,
nobody to do his bodywork, and no mechanic other than himself.
Some of his race cars even had the words mechanic
colin me painted on them, so if somebody hit him,
he tried to let it go and fix his car later,
(24:31):
rather than making work an expense for himself by hitting
them back the next time around. Apart from all of this,
even his ability to claim his winnings was affected by
his color. Many of the races had cash prizes, but
he also often won steak dinners for two at local restaurants,
but more often than not those restaurants were segregated and
(24:52):
refused to serve him. A number of times he insisted
that the restaurant give him what he had honestly and
fairly won, and the restaurant either allowed him to come
to the kitchen door and take his meal to go,
or reimbursed him for the so called value of the meal,
which was always way less money than the meal would
have actually cost if someone was paying for it. Wendell
(25:15):
Scott was finally able to enter a NASCAR sanctioned race
in nine and we're going to talk about that and
the rest of his NASCAR career on our next episode.
I'm looking forward to that one because it also has
a lot of excitement. Uh, do you have some exciting
listener mail for us? I do. This is from Keilan
and it is about our recent episode about the Battle
(25:38):
of Caha Marca and the fall of the Inca Empire. Hello,
Holly and Tracy. My name is Keilan, and first I'd
like to thank you by way of the podcast for
making my commute to anywhere more enjoyable and less anxious.
I'm gonna skip ahead just a bit. What I'm writing
about today is also to thank you for talking about
indigenous Latin American history with fair perspective. As a Spanish major,
(26:02):
I've studied Latin America as part of the language and
cultures I should be exposed to and it has really
opened my mind to the world, and your episode does
that as well. It's heartening to know that not everyone
is tainted by the exoticism that you often see associated
with South America. On the fun note, I thought you
guys might enjoy knowing that there are some people who
are attempting to bring back the Quechua language in a
(26:25):
much more contemporary light. One example of this is a
cover of Michael Jackson's The Way You Make Me Feel,
covered in the language. I have a link and I
hope you enjoy this piece of native culture. Best wishes, Kelan.
We definitely both enjoyed the link. It's so good. Um, yeah,
it's I it is really good. UM. Well, we'll probably
(26:48):
put it out on our social media after this episode
comes out. I also wanted to note that we have
had a couple of questions about how we spelled inca
um in that episode. When you see it in your player,
it is with a k um. And that is because
even though a lot of dictionaries and style guys and
things still um use the spelling I n C a
um A k is more preferred among archaeologists and historians,
(27:12):
and then actual Quetchua speaking people's at this point, so
that's why we defaulted to that one. If you would
like to write to us about this or any other
podcast or history podcast at how stuff works dot com.
And we're also all over social media at missed in History.
That is where we have our Facebook and our Twitter,
and our Pinterest and our Instagram. If you come to
our website, which is missed in History dot com, you
(27:35):
will find uh show notes for all the episodes Holly
and I have ever worked on in a searchable archive
of all the episodes ever. And you can find our
podcast and subscribe to it on Apple Podcasts, Google Play,
and wherever else you find a podcast. For more on
(27:55):
this and thousands of other topics, is it how stuff
works dot com. Eight
Hey, everybody. Before we get started today, we just wanted
to let folks know that Universal Fan con where we
were planning to be from April and to do a
live show there, has been postponed until further notice. Although
we don't have any other information right now about when
the convention might be rescheduled, we do want to apologize
to anybody who purchased a ticket or who plans to
(00:22):
come out and see us. Will post an update with
any official information that we receive on our website at
miss in history dot com at the link that says
live shows. Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History class
from how Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to
(00:45):
the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frying.
I really like the TV show Timeless. It is a
favorite of mine. I was really sad when it got
canceled and then really happy when it got uncancelled. And
in the first season of this show, it seemed like
every time I turned around, I would think, hey, we
(01:06):
have an episode of our podcast about this. It was
like there was a Hindenburg, and there was Jim Booie,
and there was Josphine Baker, and there was Davy Crockett,
and it went on and on and on. There were
so many that before the second season started up, I
actually made a board on our Pinterest called as Seen
on Timeless where I pinned all the episodes that relate
(01:27):
to past episodes of that show. So early on in
season two, I was watching Timeless and a historical figure
showed up on the screen that made me go, Okay,
stop everything, this has to be a podcast and it's
It was a very similar reaction to the one that
several of the people on the screen and the show had,
(01:47):
because this is about Wendell Scott, who was a black
driver from the early days of NASCAR. Almost his entire
racing career took place in the segregated South. I didn't
go into this in tending to write a two part
podcast on on NASCAR, but once again we have a
surprise two part sports podcast. Um. Also, I wanted to
(02:11):
note that there are people who knew him who pronounced
his name more like Windell, but the vast majority seemed
to say Wendell, including some interview with his children, some
interviews with his children, So if at some point you're
watching old TV footage about Wendell Scott, and you're like,
why did they say Windell? Let's wendell seems to be
(02:33):
the more common. Some of that is probably an accent thing, right, yes, probably,
like I could see someone with a heavy Southern accent
drawing out that second syllable a little bit more well.
And there were times that they would make rhymes uh
like chance. We don't really most of them uh are
are a use of a word we wouldn't necessarily say
(02:55):
on the show that would want rhyme with it if
you said it when dell, So that might have influenced
some people's pronunciation as well. So. Wendell Scott was born
in Danville, Virginia, on August He was one of four
children in a family that included half siblings from his
(03:15):
parents prior marriages. Danville was largely a working class city,
with its major industries being tobacco and textiles. Wendell's father
was employed as a driver for a couple of more
affluent white families, and he also worked on their cars.
From an early age, Wendell was learning the basics of
auto mechanics while helping his father. During the Great Depression,
(03:38):
work in Danville started to become scarce and the family
moved to Pennsylvania, where his dad got a job in
a Studa baker factory, and it was while they were
living out there that Wendell's parents split up. Wendell didn't
see his father again for years, and this was really
hard on him. He developed a stammer and he didn't
do very well in school. After a while, his mother
(03:59):
moved of them to Kentucky, where she had some other family.
When his grandmother's health started to decline, the family was
moved back to Danville so Wendell's mother could help take
care of her. And this is really when Wendell started
to experience the realities of segregation. His schools in Pennsylvania
and Kentucky had been integrated. When he remarked to his
(04:20):
mother that there weren't any white students or teachers at
his school in Danville, she told him, and there won't
be either. By his teens, Wendell was already working to
try to help support the family and to buy his
first car, which was a beat up Model T that
he rebuilt using parts scavenged from a junkyard. He grew
sweet potatoes and tobacco to cell and he worked at
(04:42):
a drug store he left school before graduating from high
school so he could become a bricklayer because he wanted
to help the family afford to send his younger sister
to college. Wendell Scott had spent most of his life
saying that he didn't want the kind of life that
was typical for a black man living in Danville, which
was likely to include difficult, manual labor that came with
(05:03):
significant health risks. Working in tobacco fields and textile plants
was physically grueling work, and lung problems were common due
to the exposure to tobacco and fabric dust. He didn't
really want to be a low paid cog in a
wheel that was mostly making money for someone else. These
are still very difficult and grueling jobs with risks of
(05:25):
of lung damage, but they're also a lot less common
because most of the taxtile plants moved to Mexico and
people quit smoking so much. Scott soon found that being
a bricklayer just had too much in common with all
those jobs that he had spent his whole life saying
he didn't want to do, so he quit. He started
(05:45):
driving for a taxi company, and gradually he saved up
enough money to afford his own cab. Scott developed a
reputation for being the kind of taxi driver who would
get you where you were going fast and would probably
also know where you be able to find some not
necessarily legal indulgences along the way. When somebody got into
(06:06):
his cab and mentioned wanting a drink, he knew where
to get one. After the end of prohibition, the Commonwealth
of Virginia allowed the sale of liquor in state managed
alcoholic beverage control stores, but liquor by the drink was
still illegal. He wasn't personally much of a drinker, though
he was a devout member of the New Hope Baptist Church.
(06:26):
Although he wasn't always actively attending services. Let's get you
there fast reputation also earned Scott a police record pretty quickly,
with most of his citations being for speeding. One officer
in particular seemed to have a grudge against him and
wrote out eleven of the thirteen tickets that he received
during his time as a taxi driver. Then, when he
(06:48):
was twenty, he was charged in a scheme to sell
stolen motor oil, for which he served sixty days at
a prison farm as part of a plea deal in
Scott met Mary Bell Calls while driving his cab, and
soon they were courting. In nineteen forty two, during World
War Two, Scott was drafted and he served as part
of the hundred first Airborne, although his actual work was
(07:11):
about maintaining vehicles and doing manual labor. He married Mary
while on leave on July tenth, four and she gave
birth to their first child while he was still deployed.
They would go on to have six children together. Later on,
they would also raise a seventh child, who Scott had
with another woman during his racing career, and who they
took in in the nineteen fifties after the young boy's
(07:34):
mother was killed. After the war, Scott went back to
Danville and the city refused to renew his taxi license
on the justifiable grounds he had way too many speeding
tickets to allow that. So Scott started working on a
plan to move the family out to California, but he
was convinced to stay in Danville when the owner of
the city's Black funeral home asked if he could work
(07:57):
on his cars before he left. So Scott was picking
up other work as a mechanic building on the knowledge
that he picked up from his father as a child
and from his military service during the war. This mechanic
work started to blossom into a small business housed in
a tiny building that the owner of the funeral home built,
But Scott took on a partner who wasn't nearly as
(08:20):
conservative with their money as he wanted them to be.
While Scott planned to pay both of them a salary
while carefully saving and reinvesting for their business, his partner
kept giving himself advances on his pay and eating into
that next week's budget. This venture ended abruptly when Scott's
partner was killed in an accident that also burned the
shop down. Scott was becoming well known as a good mechanic,
(08:44):
but with the loss of a little shop and everything
in it, he needed more income than he could really earn,
so he turned to a second source of income, which
was running bootleg whiskey. And we will talk more about
that after a sponsor break. When Wendell Scott got out
(09:06):
of the military, as we said earlier, prohibition was over.
It was legal to buy hard liquor by the bottle,
but not by the drink in Virginia, but there was
still a lot of bootlegging activity going on in the
Appalachian mountains and foothills. Franklin County, Virginia, was just down
the road from Danville, tucked into the foothills of the
Blue Ridge Mountains, and it was home to a thriving
(09:28):
bootleg industry. Scott would pick up moonshine in Franklin County,
where it could be bought for fifty five cents a point,
and then drive it to Charlotte, where it sold for
twice as much thanks to being in a dry county.
He had some local customers in and around Danville as well,
but the bulk of his driving was to Charlotte and back,
almost all of it at night. This is a complex
(09:50):
multi person operation. Scott usually worked with a partner who
coordinated with the actual bootleggers. Scott himself worked with the
buyers and had little contact directly with the people who
were actually making the moonshine. He had multiple cars that
were especially outfitted for bootlegging, which looked like your typical
junker from the outside, but had a powerful engine and
(10:12):
an interior that was outfitted to smuggle hidden product. He
would keep these cars stashed in various inconspicuous spots in
the foothills, leaving his regular car somewhere else out of
sight before getting into one to move the product. While
bootlegging was very lucrative, it was also extremely dangerous, and
Scott always kept a loaded pistol under the seat of
(10:34):
his bootleg cars. It was also expensive. He had to
sink a lot of his profit into his cars, especially
if one of them became too recognizable to the police
and then he had to replace it. It was also
very stressful, and it was while hauling whiskey that he
started to develop problems with stomach ulcers, which would cause
him trouble for the rest of his life. And yes,
we know it is not clear whether stress aggrevates ulcers,
(10:57):
but he and the people around him definitely made the connection. Unsurprisingly,
there are a lot of very dramatic and colorful stories
about Scott's time hauling moonshine, especially as he became notorious
for doing it in Virginia and North Carolina. He was
an excellent driver and he kept his cars really well maintained,
so it was hard for an officer to catch him alone.
(11:20):
Officers would work together with one of them staying out
of sight along a road until another radioed end that
Scott was on the way past. Once he was notified
that hidden officer would come out of hiding would tail
Scott with the headlights off until he was ready to
make a move. Scott like to say that he could
outrun the police, but not their radios. And that was
(11:40):
what happened one day when Scott was being pursued by
an officer with the headlights off and didn't realize he
was there until the officer shot out one of his tires.
Scott dove out of the moving car, hoping that it
would travel far enough to serve as a diversion. It
crashed pretty quickly and Scott hid out in some bushes
until other officers are arrived with a bloodhound to try
(12:01):
to find him, and that dog did. According to Scott,
it looked right at him and then it turned around
and led officers in another direction. And interviews he was like,
I cannot explain it. That dog just let me go.
I'm having such like weird bootlegger versions of Disney films
(12:23):
in my There was also a high speed Christmas Day
chase when a couple of customers had asked for some
product and Scott decided to take them to somebody he
knew who had a supply of it. They were in
the family car, not expecting to see any kind of
trouble on Christmas morning, but after having picked up the whiskey,
they were spotted by police on the way back to Danville.
(12:47):
What followed was a high speed chase, part of it
with Scott driving backwards on a country road after an
officer cut him off. See this is just like to
live in Diana, l A. Or like baby driver in
Nascar country. To me, it's very baby driver. But on
a dirt road. Scott got enough distance between him and
(13:09):
his pursuers that he was able to stop and stash
the whiskey and presumably get his passengers out of the car.
Then he drove back to his auto garage and Danville
got out of the car, took the engine out of it,
left it hanging from the hoist, and left. He wound
up in court after this incident, and his defense was
that the license plate number the police provided belonged to
(13:30):
a car that was in his shop with the engine out,
which they could go see for themselves. He claimed that
it had been there, broken down for more than a
week and the charges were dismissed. Uh, I think it's
in a story Corps interview. There's an interview where somebody
else relays this story um and says something like that.
(13:51):
The judge told the officers, next time, you bring me
him and the liquor and the engine of Tually, though
Scott's partner apparently set him up. This led to another
high speed chase on April ninety nine. Scott's goal in
these chases was usually to make it to the highway,
where he had more room to maneuver and could usually
(14:13):
outrun law enforcement. But this time, just before he got
to the highway, he had to swerve to avoid a
group of drunken pedestrians, some of whom were his customers,
and his car, which was full of whiskey, crashed into
a house. Local law enforcement charged Scott with reckless driving
and turned the moonshine issue over to federal authorities. A
(14:36):
federal grand jury delivered an indictment on September twelfth, ninety nine,
and although Scott pleaded guilty to his charges, he was
sentenced to three years probation because he didn't have any
prior moonshine convictions, which is kind of funny given his reputation. Yeah. Yeah, Well,
Scott's wife had always been terrified of his work in moonshine.
(14:58):
He had kept its secret from her first, and when
she found out, she wanted him to stop. Now that
he had a conviction on his record, continuing to be
involved with bootlegging was a much bigger risk, so he
needed to find another way to try to make more money,
and that was what brought him to NASCAR, which we're
going to talk about after a sponsor break. Before NASCAR
(15:25):
was formed, auto racing had already been going on in
the United States for decades. Basically, for as long as
there have been cars, people have been racing them. The
American Automobile Association or Triple A was a major player
in these early pre NASCAR years of racing, and people
race lots of different types of cars before World War Two.
(15:46):
And although racing has long been associated mostly with the South,
a lot of these early races were really driven by
and catered to the interests of Northerners. It was more
about the fact that you could keep a racetrack drivable
year round in the South a lot easier than you
could in the North. Than anything that was specific to
Southern culture. Racing was far less popular during World War
(16:08):
Two since things like gasoline, rubber, and metal were all
critical to the war effort. But after the war was over,
stock car racing started to become the most popular variety
of auto racing in the United States. So a stock
car is a racing car that has the same basic
chassis as one that's in commercial production, although there are
a number of modifications that can be part of stock
(16:29):
car racing as well. The largest sanctioning body for stock
car racing in the United States as the National Association
for Stock Car Auto Racing or NASCAR, founded by Bill
France Senior, who was known as Big Bill. NASCAR was
founded in Daytona Beach, Florida, on February and France also
(16:50):
served as the organization's first president. He put a particular
focus in promoting the sport and building new racetracks in
the South. Part of the lore of at the beginning
of NASCAR is that it started out with a bunch
of bootleggers in and near the North Carolina Mountains racing
each other and honing their skills evading the law. And
then Big Bill France saw that all these homegrown races
(17:12):
had their own rules and standards and thought the sport
of racing could benefit from a governing body to establish
standards and sanctions specific races. There's definitely some truth to
the idea that a lot of the first NASCAR drivers
had a history of involvement in bootlegging, and there was
also a lot of bootlegging money that made its way
back into the sport by funding cars and tracks and publicity.
(17:36):
There wasn't a lot of segregation in bootlegging. People who
were making whiskey and driving it around and drinking it.
We're all over the racial spectrum and they were all
on the wrong side of the law together basically. So
there were other black bootleggers, and Wendell Scott had a
lot of history with this in the same part of
the country. But that wasn't quite how Wendell Scott came
(18:00):
to be a NASCAR driver. After his conviction in someone
took him to a race at the Danville Fairgrounds. These
races were not part of NASCAR. They were part of
the Dixie Circuit, which ran several races in Virginia and
North Carolina. Watching this race was exhilarating, and Scott thought
it was something he might try to do, but he
(18:21):
wasn't really sure how to go about getting into it. Simultaneously,
racing promoter Martin Rogers wanted to figure out how to
draw a bigger audience at the Fairgrounds races. The Dixie
Circuit was struggling in Danville because the economy in the
area wasn't great and people didn't really have the extra
cash to go spend at the races. Rogers eventually thought
(18:43):
a good publicity stunt might be to introduce a black driver,
somebody who was really good and could at least give
the white drivers who were already part of the circuit
a good run for their money. He didn't have a
lot of luck finding someone who fit this bill, so
he came up with an ingenious way to figure route
which black men in Danville might be good at driving fast.
(19:04):
He asked the cops. The cops told him that if
they wanted a black man who could drive, they wanted
Wendell Scott. So Rogers got in touch with Scott. And
there's a little discrepancy in the dates, but it seems
as though his first race was on May twenty, nineteen
fifty two. He borrowed one of his old whiskey cars
from a relative that he'd sold it to after it
(19:26):
had become too recognizable to law enforcement. There are a
lot of accounts that say that Scott came in third
and his first race at Examvil Fairgrounds, winning fifty dollars,
but according to his recounting of it in the book
Hard Driving, The Wendell Scott Story by Brian Donovan, he
started out really well, but pushed his car so hard
at the beginning that it didn't have the stamina to
(19:48):
make it all the way through the whole race. He
pulled out a couple of laps before the race was over.
In spite of this, and in spite of some of
the spectators booing and throwing things at him, he loved
that first race. He repaired the car that night and
the next day towed it to Winston Salem, North Carolina,
bringing some friends with him with the hope of racing
(20:09):
it at Bowman Gray Stadium. Bowman Gray is a NASCAR
sanctioned track, and it was the first sanctioned track to
do weekly races, holding them every Saturday night in the summer.
It's likely that the first people he talked to a
bowm and gray that night didn't realize that Wendell Scott
was black. He had a medium brown complexion that had
kind of a ruddy tone, and his eyes were blue.
(20:32):
Especially with a hat on, people often thought that he
was white, so at first everything seemed to be progressing normally.
He was allowed to register for the race, His car
was inspected and he was told that he would need
to install a safety belt. He went over to the
tracks shop to buy one, and the next thing he knew,
he was being told he couldn't race after all, but
(20:53):
no reason was given as to why. When Scott had
been talking to officials at the track, he'd been by himself,
but when he went over to the shop to get
the safety belt, he took some of his friends with him,
and his suspicion was that when officials saw them altogether,
they concluded that, he, like his friends, was black and
banned him from the race. A similar scenario played out
(21:15):
the next day in high Point, North Carolina. So Scott
went back to the Dixie Circuit, where he scored his
first win on June fourth, ninety two at the age
of thirty, and after a while he started branching out
from the Dixie Circuit into other non NASCAR races in Virginia,
and he started winning a lot of those two. Even
(21:36):
though he was being allowed to enter these races, it
wasn't all smooth sailing. On July two, he won the
Amateur class race and asked if he could enter the
Sportsman class race that night as well. The races promoter
asked the spectators to vote on it, and more than
half of them stood up as a yes. But during
the Sportsman class race, a wheel flew off his race
(21:58):
car and into the stands. Several spectators were injured. Some
of the crowd was outraged, and news accounts of what
had happened focused on his race. Meanwhile, Scott spent hours
at the hospital afterward talking to the people who had
been hurt. Violence among the drivers was also pretty common
in this racing scene. If one driver ran another one
(22:21):
off the track during the race, he might get punched
for it afterward, and the idea of payback was also common.
If you intentionally wrecked somebody's car during a race, they
might wreck yours during the next one. Scott did everything
he could to stay out of all of this, Although
there were other black drivers before Wendell Scott started racing,
(22:41):
he was always the only black driver at these events,
and apart from being the only participant of his race,
these events were places that were often thick with racism.
In a world where a black man might be lynched
for allegedly whistling and a white woman, there was no
way he was going to run the risk of striking
white man over a stock car race. It's one of
(23:03):
the things that's most incredible to me about his story
is that he was in a basically exclusively white sport
almost I mean, there were a few other black drivers
and in some cases like um all black racing teams
and networks, but like for the most part, an exclusively
white sport and a place that had active and overt
(23:24):
violent history toward the black community, and like the the
logo of the Dixie Circuit was a pair of crossed flags.
One of the flags was the checkered flag that drops
when the race is over, and the other one was
a Confederate flag. Like, he was doing all of this
in completely hostile territory, and and the only exception to
just really keeping his head down and trying not to
(23:47):
make waves would be when spectators or other races. Racers
threatened his children, which actually happened fairly often, everything from
shouting racist slurs at them to one case where somebody
threw a lit firecracker at his son and burned his hand.
But even then, he was a lot more likely to
storm at somebody and shout at them than he was
(24:09):
to actually strike them, and he also didn't have the
luxury of payback. Scott had no sponsors, no paid pit crew,
nobody to do his bodywork, and no mechanic other than himself.
Some of his race cars even had the words mechanic
colin me painted on them, so if somebody hit him,
he tried to let it go and fix his car later,
(24:31):
rather than making work an expense for himself by hitting
them back the next time around. Apart from all of this,
even his ability to claim his winnings was affected by
his color. Many of the races had cash prizes, but
he also often won steak dinners for two at local restaurants,
but more often than not those restaurants were segregated and
(24:52):
refused to serve him. A number of times he insisted
that the restaurant give him what he had honestly and
fairly won, and the restaurant either allowed him to come
to the kitchen door and take his meal to go,
or reimbursed him for the so called value of the meal,
which was always way less money than the meal would
have actually cost if someone was paying for it. Wendell
(25:15):
Scott was finally able to enter a NASCAR sanctioned race
in nine and we're going to talk about that and
the rest of his NASCAR career on our next episode.
I'm looking forward to that one because it also has
a lot of excitement. Uh, do you have some exciting
listener mail for us? I do. This is from Keilan
and it is about our recent episode about the Battle
(25:38):
of Caha Marca and the fall of the Inca Empire. Hello,
Holly and Tracy. My name is Keilan, and first I'd
like to thank you by way of the podcast for
making my commute to anywhere more enjoyable and less anxious.
I'm gonna skip ahead just a bit. What I'm writing
about today is also to thank you for talking about
indigenous Latin American history with fair perspective. As a Spanish major,
(26:02):
I've studied Latin America as part of the language and
cultures I should be exposed to and it has really
opened my mind to the world, and your episode does
that as well. It's heartening to know that not everyone
is tainted by the exoticism that you often see associated
with South America. On the fun note, I thought you
guys might enjoy knowing that there are some people who
are attempting to bring back the Quechua language in a
(26:25):
much more contemporary light. One example of this is a
cover of Michael Jackson's The Way You Make Me Feel,
covered in the language. I have a link and I
hope you enjoy this piece of native culture. Best wishes, Kelan.
We definitely both enjoyed the link. It's so good. Um, yeah,
it's I it is really good. UM. Well, we'll probably
(26:48):
put it out on our social media after this episode
comes out. I also wanted to note that we have
had a couple of questions about how we spelled inca
um in that episode. When you see it in your player,
it is with a k um. And that is because
even though a lot of dictionaries and style guys and
things still um use the spelling I n C a
um A k is more preferred among archaeologists and historians,
(27:12):
and then actual Quetchua speaking people's at this point, so
that's why we defaulted to that one. If you would
like to write to us about this or any other
podcast or history podcast at how stuff works dot com.
And we're also all over social media at missed in History.
That is where we have our Facebook and our Twitter,
and our Pinterest and our Instagram. If you come to
our website, which is missed in History dot com, you
(27:35):
will find uh show notes for all the episodes Holly
and I have ever worked on in a searchable archive
of all the episodes ever. And you can find our
podcast and subscribe to it on Apple Podcasts, Google Play,
and wherever else you find a podcast. For more on
(27:55):
this and thousands of other topics, is it how stuff
works dot com. Eight
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
Popular Podcasts
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.
Therapy Gecko
An unlicensed lizard psychologist travels the universe talking to strangers about absolutely nothing. TO CALL THE GECKO: follow me on https://www.twitch.tv/lyleforever to get a notification for when I am taking calls. I am usually live Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays but lately a lot of other times too. I am a gecko.