When nearly all voting Blacks were Republicans-the party of Abraham Lincoln-William Scott broke away to become a Democrat.
“He saw the political game for what it was: a game of power.” “Scott refused to be complicit in backing politicians who took him and the broader base of first-generation black voters for dupes,” notes Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Like many in his era, he believed in political patronage and frequently led rebellions against political bosses who failed to deliver jobs and reforms in exchange for votes. Scott was an outspoken advocate for equal rights. “William Scott struggled into the twentieth century to retain the progress made by African Americans.” “The post-Civil War era in the United States was a time of promise for African Americans, but in the late nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries they lost ground with the rise of Jim Crow laws and scientific racism,” says the book’s author, Bruce Mouser. Eventually he became the publisher and editor of what may have been America’s first African American daily newspaper, the Cairo Gazette, and became active in politics. He also branched into legal businesses including hotels, saloons, and real estate. Scott emerges in Mouser’s biography as a powerful, interesting, and enigmatic leader working on both sides of the law to further his own interests and those of the larger African American community,” Bridges notes.Īs Mouser discovered, Scott was a charismatic hustler who built his fortune in Illinois in the Cairo–East Saint Louis area through illegal liquor sales, gambling, and operating houses of ill repute. “William Thomas Scott was a maverick who worked tirelessly to promote and advance the black community (while at the same time lining his own pockets in the sordid world of gambling, prostitution, and tavern-keeping). “The biography is a fascinating and informative look into the life of a forgotten but important African American leader who charted his own course from the Civil War to the eve of America’s entry into World War I,” says Roger Bridges, historian at Illinois State University. He saw the end of slavery and was already a political player when African Americans obtained the right to vote in 1870.Ĭairo, Illinois during the Civil War (National Historical Society photo) He joined the Union Navy in 1863 and served at Cairo, Illinois, the headquarters of Union Forces in the West during the Civil War.
Born in Ohio in 1839, Scott was a free man before the Civil War.
Scott’s story is set in a time when Black Americans were experiencing enormous change.
The book is published by the University of Wisconsin Press and has a foreword by Harvard professor, author, and documentary filmmaker Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Mouser, is the first biography of Scott, whose story has been largely forgotten except in the Cairo area. He is alleged to have been one of the wealthiest African Americans in Illinois at the peak of his career.Ī new book, A Black Gambler’s World of Liquor, Vice, and Presidential Politics: William Thomas Scott of Illinois, 1839–1917, by Bruce L. WILLIAM THOMAS SCOTT was an entrepreneur and political activist from East Saint Louis and Cairo, Illinois, who in 1904 briefly became the first African American nominated by a national party for president of the United States.