Way back in December 1963 NASCAR held a race in Jacksonville, Fla.
Jacksonville and NASCAR were much different 58 years ago than they’re today. This was just days after JFK was assassinated, a few months after the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham that killed four girls and less than a year after Bull Connor turned dogs and fire hoses on MLK and peaceful protesters in the streets of downtown Birmingham.
NASCAR was still decades away from its determination to transform itself from a redneck Southern regional oddity to a national sport on a par with baseball and football and basketball.
NASCAR was also still years away from the kind of technology that made it a lot easier to figure out things like who won the race and who was still on the lead lap.
So it wouldn’t have been all that unusual back in 1963 for there to be some confusion as to who won that race in Jacksonville — except for the fact that it was Jacksonville and the apparent winner was the only black driver in the sport, Wendell Scott.
Scott had not won a race before. No black driver had ever won a NASCAR race. NASCAR officials could only imagine with horror what the reaction might be from the crowd of white fans if Scott were to be escorted to Victory Lane and if, as was NASCAR’s custom, he were to plant a kiss on the white beauty queen who handed out the trophy.
So they lied.
They declared that the guy who had finished second was the winner. He was white.
This was easy to get away with because in the days before electronic scoring it was harder to keep track of which drivers were still on the lead lap.
It wasn’t until after everyone had left the track that NASCAR corrected their “mistake” and told Scott that he was actually the winner. Oops. Sorry Wendell.
That might have been the end of that sorry little episode in racism but for the fact that NASCAR never retrieved the trophy they gave to the other guy. Scott never received a trophy, a slight that stuck in his craw until the day he died about 30 years ago.
Scott was never a top-level driver for a well-funded team. He was scrappy and tough-as-nails, getting by on a shoestring and relying on his sons to be his pit crew.
Scott, who like many NASCAR pioneers was involved in the moonshine business, had actually been recruited to be a driver in the 50s by the owner of a track in Virginia who thought fans would pay to see a black driver try to beat the white drivers.
When he got to the sport’s top level, he had to deal with a lot of nastiness from other drivers and officials who didn’t want any black drivers in the sport. he once carried a pistol with him during a race because one driver in particular had been harassing him on the track. Scott showed him the gun during the race and the other driver backed off.
One track owner banned Scott from his track.
In those years after Jacksonville until he finally retired after a bad crash at Talladega, Scott never won another race. And he never got that trophy he earned.
Until now.
NASCAR plans to present the trophy to Scott’s family at Daytona International Speedway next month in the final regular season race.
NASCAR has tried over the last several years to make amends for how Scott was treated and for the sport’s lack of diversity.
"My father said that 'they thought I wanted to kiss that white beauty queen.' He said 'I've got a beautiful wife, and I can kiss my wife,'" Scott's son Frank said in a 2008 documentary. "He said 'I wanted my money and I wanted my recognition.' This joy was taken away from him because of racism."
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Scott was inducted into the NASCAR Hall of Fame in 2015, but remains the only Black driver in Cup Series history to win a race. Scott had been the lone Black driver to win a race in any of NASCAR's national touring series until 2013, when Bubba Wallace earned the first of his six career victories in the NASCAR Camping World Truck Series.
Wallace is now a driver in the NASCAR Cup Series, the top series of the sport, for a team co-owned by NBA legend Michael Jordan. Last year, when it was thought that someone had hung up a noose in a garage stall during a race to intimidate Wallace, the sport rallied around him. NASCAR also finally banned the Confederate battle flag from its events after resisting that edict for years.
Times have changed. Thankfully. And maybe now Wendell Scott can rest in peace.