When people look back on the career of the late U.S. Rep. David Scott, who died this week at the age of 80, many will focus on the fact that the declining Democrat certainly should have retired from Congress long before he passed.
But the waning years of Scott’s career should not obscure all that he achieved before then, nor, especially, what he called his “great American story.”
That story began in the little town where he was born, in segregated Aynor, South Carolina. He lived on a farm there with his father, a pastor, mother, and grandparents until his parents took work “up North,” as he said, as domestic workers for wealthy white families in Pennsylvania and New York.
Not only was Scott the only Black student in his junior high class in Scarsdale, New York, he told me once in an interview, his family was the only Black family he knew of in the entire town.
“What an experience. My education was being there in that kind of environment,” he said.
Looking back on his childhood, the deeply religious Scott said he felt God was preparing him for the day he would eventually rise to the height of a career he never could have imagined as the chairman of the U.S. House Agriculture Committee in Washington, D.C.
“I picked the cotton, I suckered tobacco, I fed the hogs, I milked the cows,” he said of the summers he went back to work on the farm in Aynor as a boy. He remembered plowing the fields with a mule long before tractors became commonplace in Horry County. “God was preparing me way back for this significant time.”
He saw other events in his life as more than happenstance, too. His sixth grade field trip to the New York Stock Exchange opened his eyes to the world of business and finance. A $300 local scholarship in Florida, where his parents moved later, exactly covered tuition for a trimester at Florida A&M. That’s where he met his wife, Alfredia Aaron, on the steps of a dormitory on campus. She became his lifelong partner, personally and professionally.
A summer internship in college took him to the Labor Department in Washington, where a senior adviser suggested he attend the Wharton School of Finance for a business degree, which he did. He knew he would return to Washington again, someday.
“It was all through God’s blessing,” he said.
After moving to Atlanta and starting a billboard business, Scott eventually ran for the Georgia House of Representatives, joining the chamber in 1975, the same year former state Rep. Calvin Smyre from Columbus arrived.
“He was a great orator and very determined,” Smyre said. When Scott ran for the state Senate, he and Smyre eventually became chairmen of the powerful House and Senate Rules Committees at the same time. “To have two African Americans at that time both chair the rules committees was a major occurrence in the General Assembly,” Smyre said.
At the state Capitol, Scott passed bills to create a mandatory moment of silence in Georgia schools at the start of each day, along with gun safety bills to make it harder for children to access guns. He was part of the effort to create PeachCare, the state’s health insurance program for children.
He ran for Congress in 2002 and was reelected 11 times after that. But it was his role in Congress on the powerful House Agriculture Committee, which he eventually chaired, that Scott said felt like destiny. There, he focused on rural development for places like the town where he was born, along with nutrition programs, supporting Georgia’s agriculture industry, battling discrimination against Black farmers, and fighting for historically Black colleges and universities.
I interviewed Scott in 2021 for a column on the simultaneous ascent of three Black Georgia lawmakers — Scott, U.S. Rep. Sanford Bishop, and U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock — to the top levels of power in the agriculture arena in Washington just as COVID-19 was disrupting supply chains and the American food supply.
“Finally, here we are at this historic time,” he said. “If that ain’t God working, I don’t know what is.”
In the hours after news of his death broke, Scott’s colleagues in Congress remembered him as warm and gracious and, especially devoted to his faith. U.S. Rep. Sanford Bishop, D-Albany, served with Scott in the state Capitol and in Congress and led moment of reflection.
“We shared a friendship that was rooted in faith, family and a deep commitment to the people we represent,” he said on the House floor Wednesday as the chamber paused to honor him.
U.S. Rep. Austin Scott, R-Tifton, said his strongest memory of Scott will be the weathered briefcase he carried, always with his Bible packed at the top. He said Scott pulled out the Bible to read on nearly every flight they shared together flying between Washington and Atlanta.
“I remember literally picking up some of the pages one day when they fell out and how I wish we all had that devotion,” he said.
Looking back on the trajectory of his career, Scott told me in that final interview that he wanted to make sure readers knew that it was “God’s divine blessing” that made all of it possible and that it would not have been anywhere else.
“What a great nation, with a great American story,” he said.
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