Scott, William Alexander II

Impact on the world

Scott launched the weekly Atlanta World on August 5, 1928, stating in its first issue that “the responsibility of a Negro newspaper is to dispense to the public good wholesome information” at a time when white-owned Atlanta papers covered Black residents chiefly through crime reporting. By promoting the paper as a straightforward business venture rather than a political organ, he secured advertising from both Black and white businesses, including Coca-Cola and Sears, and on March 13, 1932, converted it to the Atlanta Daily World, the first Black newspaper to publish daily in the country. In 1931 he founded the Southern Newspaper Syndicate, launching sister papers in Chattanooga and Memphis, which by 1933 had grown into the fifty-paper Scott Newspaper Syndicate, one of the largest Black-owned business enterprises in the United States; Scott was shot and killed outside his home on February 4, 1934, in a murder that was never solved.

Life & background

Born in 1902 in Edwards, Mississippi, the son of a minister, Scott was educated at Morehouse College, where his debate-team training later helped him persuade a skeptical banker to finance a Black-owned newspaper, and worked as the only Black clerk on a Jacksonville-to-Washington rail line before publishing Black business directories in Jacksonville and then Atlanta in the late 1920s. He founded the Atlanta World in 1928 and built it and its sister papers into the Scott/Southern Newspaper Syndicate over the following six years; after his unsolved 1934 murder at age 32, his brother Cornelius Adolphus “C.A.” Scott took over the paper and ran it for the next 63 years.

Sources

1. BlackPast.org; New Georgia Encyclopedia; Face2Face Africa