Emmett J. Scott
February 13, 1873–December 12, 1957
Houston’s Emmett J. Scott served as the right-hand man for one of the most influential figures in African American history. Along the way, he developed enormous influence himself in education, business, journalism, and politics.
Born in 1873, Scott was the founder of the Houston Freeman, the city’s first Black newspaper. In 1897, he invited Booker T. Washington to visit Houston. Scott so impressed the famed educator that Washington hired him as his private secretary.
Scott joined Washington at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. Working under Washington, Scott soon directed a far-flung network of Black organizations and newspapers, wielding national political influence.
In 1909, President Taft appointed Scott to the American Commission to Liberia, a high-profile diplomatic position. During World War I, Scott advised the War Department, combating racial discrimination in the armed forces while increasing African American enlistment. Following the war, Scott left Tuskegee to become the business manager of Howard University in Washington, DC.
Scott was also a successful businessman who championed his mentor’s vision of Black advancement through entrepreneurship, investing in the earliest Black-owned record labels and insurance companies. During World War II, Scott combined business acumen with public service as a manager of one of the nation’s leading shipbuilding firms.
Scott lived to see the modern civil rights movement emerge before he passed in 1957.
For More about Emmett J. Scott
From the Tuskegee Institute to Howard University, Scott devoted much of his career to sustaining historically Black colleges and universities. It is fitting, then, that Morgan State University in Baltimore houses his collected papers at their new, state-of-the-art Earl S. Richardson Library. The library’s archives also hold collections related to the father of modern gospel music Thomas Dorsey, chemist and inventor George Washington Carver, and physicist Julius Taylor.
Emmett Scott is one of the primary links between Texas and Booker T. Washington. Washington’s daughter Portia and her husband William Sidney Pittman provide another. The couple spent the 1910s and 1920s in Dallas, where Portia worked as a musical educator at the Dallas high school named for her father. The school, now relocated in the city’s Arts District, is one of the state’s premier arts magnets, and its alumni include musicians Erykah Badu, Edie Brickell, and Norah Jones. Her husband William Sidney Pittman was a prominent architect who designed African Methodist Episcopal Churches in Dallas, Fort Worth, Waxahachie, and Houston, as well as the historic Knights of Pythias Temple in Dallas’s Deep Ellum district. The Pythian Temple, his masterpiece, is currently under renovation after falling into disrepair for many years.
Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute in Alabama has historically been one of the premier black institutions for education and innovation in the U. S. South. This was particularly true during the Jim Crow Era, when Washington and Scott carved out a space for Black agency and political activity stifled elsewhere in the region. In addition to Washington and Scott, significant figures from the school’s history include scientist George Washington Carver, writer Claude McKay, musician Lionel Ritchie, and the famed Tuskegee Airmen.
Selected Bibliography
Dailey, Jr., Maceo Crenshaw. "The Business Life of Emmett Jay Scott." Business History Review 77, no. 4 (Winter 2003): 667–686.
Dailey, Jr., Maceo Crenshaw. When the Saints Go Hobbling In: Emmett Jay Scott and the Booker T. Washington Movement. El Paso: Sweet Earth Flying Press, 2013.
Green, Barbara L. "Scott, Emmett Jay." Handbook of Texas Online. Accessed September 13, 2022.
Harlan, Louis R. Booker T. Washington: The Making of a Black Leader, 1856–1901. New York: Oxford University Press, 1972.
Harlan, Louis R. Booker T. Washington: The Wizard of Tuskegee, 1901–1915. New York: Oxford University Press, 1983.
Harlan, Louis R. Booker T. Washington in Perspective: Essays of Louis R. Harlan. Oxford: University of Mississippi Press, 1988.
McLarnon, John M. "Pie in the Sky vs. Meat and Potatoes: The Case of Sun Ship’s Yard No. 4." Journal of American Studies 34, no. 1 (April 2000): 67–88.
Scott, Emmett J., and Lyman Beecher Stowe. Booker T. Washington: Builder of a Civilization. New York: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1917.
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