Scott
*Cornelius Adolphus ”C.A.” Scott was born on this date in 1908. He was a Black newspaper publisher.
The 5th child of nine children, Scott, was from Edwards, Miss. His father, Dr. William A. Scott Sr., was a Christian Church minister and a printer. His mother, Emmeline Southall Scott, was active in the church in the printing business and helped her husband, print church bulletins distributed throughout Mississippi.
Scott took control of the Atlanta Daily World at the request of his dying brother, World founder William A. Scott, in 1934. For 63 years, he guided one of the country’s oldest and first successful Black daily newspapers through the terror of random lynching, Jim Crow laws that legalized segregation, police brutality, and lagging opportunity in housing and jobs for African Americans. In 1946, two Black couples were murdered in broad daylight near Monroe, Ga., by a mob that tied them up and shot them hundreds of times. Responding to the horror of the ”Monroe Massacre,” Scott immediately set up a fund through the Daily World to raise money for the victims’ families. Two years later, after editorializing favor of allowing Blacks on the local police force, Scott participated in the selection of Atlanta’s first Black police officers.
The Daily World also waged a campaign in the 1940s to increase the pay of Black teachers, who were paid about half as much as white teachers. During the 1950s and 1960s, the Daily World filled its pages with information about court cases and lawsuits filed to desegregate public facilities. Scott, who joined the Republican Party in 1952 and never left, worked unstintingly for a two-party system in Georgia. Scott received numerous awards in his lifetime, including being inducted into the Black Press Hall of Fame in 1990. C.A. Scott died on May 7, 2000, at age 92.
